Rui Joaquim and Carlos Ribeiro, "Code Voting: Protection Against Automatic Vote Manipulation in an Uncontrolled Environment"

I recently received this paper from Rui Joaquim, from the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa — INESC-ID. Rui was a participant in the Dagstuhl conference this past summer on electronic voting. Here is the abstract from their paper:

One of the major problems that prevent the widespread of Internet voting is the vulnerability of the voter’s computer. A computer connected to the Internet is exposed to virus, worms, spyware, malware and other threats that can endanger the election’s integrity. For instance, it is possible to write a virus that changes the voter’s vote to one predetermined vote on election’s day. It is possible to write such a virus so that the voter would not notice anything wrong with the voting application. This attack is very dangerous because it may pass undetected. To prevent such attack it is necessary to prevent automatic vote manipulation at voter’s computer. Here we present CodeVoting, a technique to create a secure communication channel to a smart card that prevents vote manipulation by the voter’s PC, while at the same time allows the use of any cryptographic voting protocol to protect the election’s integrity at the server side of the voting application.

As I was recently reading this paper, I realized that I’ve still not taken the time to write about the Dagstuhl conference, something I hope to do in the new year. Robert has written some about his experience at the conference, but I’ll get some of my reactions and comments posted sometime in the new year.

But one of the very interesting aspects of the Dagstuhl conference was the opportunity to meet researchers from outside the US, like Rui. There is a lot of interesting research being done outside the US these days on electronic voting, and it was a great pleasure to meet many of those researchers and to hear more about their work.

Rui is presenting this paper at a conference, so if you’d like to get a copy of this paper I suggest sending him an email (rjoaquim@cc.isel.ipl.pt).