Enhanced I-Voting System based on Helios and Public Key Digital Certificates

Abstract

Voting is the process by which representatives of the country (or an organization) are chosen. Everyone has the right to elect candidates who deem fit to lead the country. It must be ensured that the elections are fair and that votes are not manipulated, deleted or changed, or even that voters are forced to vote for candidates they don't want. Some voters do not go to the polls to vote for personal or public reasons. One solution to this problem is Internet voting (I-voting) where it can be voted from anywhere and anytime. Internet voting has many advantages and certainly, there are disadvantages. Many I-voting systems have been proposed, but their use is low and uncommon in the world. This is due to the lack of confidence on the Internet among voters because it is possible that the system is being attacked from anywhere in the world and also not everyone in the world uses the Internet. The Helios Voting System, an open source system, is one of the most popular voting systems. This thesis presents a proposed I-voting system based on Helios and a public key certificate. The reason for using Helios is that it is open-source, widespread use and easily accessible. Improvements to the Helios system have been proposed. A certification authority has been added which creates voter certificates containing public and private keys which are used later in the voting process, where it is used in encryption and digital signature. Signing the vote also added by either Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) or Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) algorithm. Each voter has given one real account and other fake accounts to be used in case the voter is coerced. Finally, the Helios interface has been improved and the Arabic language has been added to the system. The system has been tested and the timing needed to sign and encrypt the vote has been calculated and compared with Helios. It was found that adding the certification authority increases safety and scalability, and also the time taken for the proposed system compared to the original system is very close despite the addition of the digital signature. Adding multiple accounts makes the voter more VI free to choose the account she wants and use it in coercive situations. The new interfaces have been also tested, and a questionnaire of 60 people has been conducted. The results have indicated that the satisfaction level of voters is higher for the proposed system compared to the original Helios interfaces