Working Paper released

Internet voting (e-Voting) has become a real possibility, however, the general voting principles have to be adhered to also in internet voting. The following is-sues have to be addressed:

1. eligible voters have to be identified when registering for e-voting,

2. at the same time, anonymity in casting votes has to be ensured.

3. Also, the administration of the election servers must not have any possibility to manipulate votes.

The prototype presented in this research report is based upon a procedure developed at the Dept. of Production Management at WU Vienna, which has been internationally published and which is therefore open to discussion and scrutiny (see the selection of papers in this report). To absolutely ensure anonym-ity, the process is divided into two parts:

1. registration, where eligible voters may retrieve an electronic election token and

2. voting, where the token is used to anonymously cast a vote.

This two-fold process requires the token to be stored on a secure medium, ideally a signature (smart) card, in Austria, this would be the Citizen Card (Bürgerkarte). The prototype implements the first part of the process, that is registration at the electronic voters’ register and retrieval of an electronic election token. The prototype is embedded in the real infrastructure of the digital signature card (Bürgerkarte), Austria’s Central Citizens Register (ZMR) and the Trust Center operated by Datakom Vienna:

1. Voter identification using ZMR
   Using the link between the digital certificate provided by the Trust Center and the citizen’s ZMR ID; this link is the decisive feature of Austria’s Bürgerkarte

2. Digital signature using the security layer provided by the Bürgerkarte

The process is detailed in 2.1, the following itemization provides a brief high-level overview:

1. The eligible voter retrieves the Web application for electronic voter registration.

2. The voter sends a digitally signed application for an electronic election token to the Registrator, which in turn authenticates the voter using the ZMR ID provided and determines his/her constituency. If the voter can be authenticated the Registrator returns a signed election token. Since blind signature is used (see explanation below), the Registrator does not “see” the token it signs, which preserves voter anonymity.

3. A similar protocol is executed with the Trust Cen-ter, where the voter obtains a second blindly signed token, which is used for additional safety.

4. Both tokens are stored at the voter.

Similar to „normal“ digital signatures, blind signatures provide a secure medium of authentication; in this case, however, the signor does not “see” the message which it signs. To draw on a real-world example, a blind signature would correspond to signing a docu-ment wrapped in a carbon paper envelope: The signature traced on the document is genuine, but the signor never sees the document itself. Blind signa-tures are also used for digital cash.
The prototype presented herein, implements the registration phase. To implement the entire protocol, the second stage is still to be implemented: to use the electronic token to cast a vote. An application for a research grant is currently under review at the Anniversary Foundation of the City of Vienna.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our research work by the Anniversary Foundation of the City of Vienna and the University of Economcis and Business Administration Vienna. We owe thanks to Datakom Vienna for providing digital signature cards.

Vienna, in November 2002

Alexander Prosser, Robert Kofler,
Robert Krimmer and Martin Unger

Related Links

• Internetwahlen (e-Voting) sind zu einer realen Möglichkeit geworden,es müssen aber die allgemeinen Wahlrechtsgrundsätze eingehalten werden.Bei der Entwicklung eines e-Voting-Systems müssen insbesondere folgende Probleme gelöst werden: eindeutige Identifik - http://epub.wu-wien.ac.at/dyn/virlib/wp/showentry?ID=epub-wu-01_3c4

Original publishing date: 18.11.2002 (was imported from the old evoting.at site)