Trustworthy Voting Systems
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Surrey
Department Name: Computing Science
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Publications
Ryan P
(2009)
PrÊt À Voter: a Voter-Verifiable Voting System
in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Ryan P
(2015)
End-to-End Verifiability in Voting Systems, from Theory to Practice
in IEEE Security & Privacy
Ryan PYA
(2016)
Real-world electronic voting: design, analysis and deployment
Schneider S
(2011)
Focus group views on Prêt à Voter 1.0
Schneider S
(2012)
E-Voting and Identity
Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Steve Schneider And Zhe Xia
(2013)
On key sizes for electronic voting
in 7th Chinese Conference on Trusted Computing and Information Security
| Description | A verifiable electronic voting system allows voters and the general public to verify that the voting system has properly collected and processed the votes. Voters can check that their votes have been correctly included in the tally, and anyone can check that the result has been calculated correctly. Verifiability allows voters to have confidence that the system does not have bugs that affect the election, and that it has not been hacked or manipulated. It must do this while maintaining secrecy of the vote. This grant has investigated the nature of verifiable voting in the polling place, and has developed the design for a verifiable voting system, which has been implemented for use in the November 2014 State election in the State of Victoria, Australia. The project has made a number of contributions to the foundations of verifiable voting. One aspect of this is the formal modelling and analysis of protocols for verifiable voting systems, so that the designs are mathematically analysed to ensure that they are logically correct. The basic approach has been extended so that it can handle preference voting, where voters rank the candidates in order rather than simply selecting one. Advances have been made on particular elements of the design. These include a robust and secure concurrent design for the Web Bulletin Board, a component for reliably receiving and publicly posting election information; print-on-demand, which allows ballot papers to be printed on request (at vote time) rather than ahead of the election, in a way that preserves the required secrecy levels; and a method for handling preference voting that scales up to large numbers of candidates, while maintaining the efficiency of the election. A variety of interfaces have been investigated and the research has discovered some novel approaches, including voting through a surface, and voting using a tablet, the use of authentication codes, write-ins (which are used in US elections). User trials and focus groups have been used to identify voters' understanding of the verifiability mechanism. |
| Exploitation Route | The developed code is all open source (GPL) and can be taken forward by others. |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Description | The findings from the project have been used as the basis for the world's first practical and scalable end-to-end verifiable voting system for a political election. The State of Victoria, Australia, decided in 2012 to use our design for the electronic voting system used for their State Election in November 2014. Hence the impact was on public policy and on secure electronic elections. The system provides accessibility for blind, partially sighted and motor impaired voters; voters for whom English is not their first language; and voters out of state and overseas. The verifiability of the system ensures that voters and observers can verify the integrity of the election. The findings regarding verifiable voting had an impact on Australian public policy: they were used by the Victorian State Parliament in their decision to proceed with verifiable electronic voting. The verifiable voting system software developed within the project has been made available as open source. The Web Bulletin Board developed for this project is an instance of a Distributed Ledger Technology, with specific properties approprate to electronic voting. This realisation has led to further research in Distributed Ledger Technologies |
| First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | Publication of the IET Report "Internet Voting in the UK", as Chair of the IET E-Voting Working Group, The rep[ort considers the opportunities challenges around the prospect of evoting in the UK. |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Membership of a guideline committee |
| URL | https://www.theiet.org/media/7025/internet-voting-in-the-uk.pdf |
| Description | Victoria Policy on evoting |
| Geographic Reach | Australia |
| Policy Influence Type | Citation in other policy documents |
| Impact | This provides the ability to provide electronic voting in a secure and verifiable way in the State of Victoria, Australia. This enables accessible interfaces for blind, partially sighted and motor impaired voters; voters for whom English is not their first language; remote (out of state and overseas) voters. It also enables malformed ballots to be detected and voters alerted, preventing accidentally spoiled ballots. |
| URL | http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/emc/ifvea/emc.ifvea.discussionpaper.pdf |
| Description | Applications of Distributed Ledger Technologies |
| Amount | £614,484 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/P031811/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 06/2017 |
| End | 05/2019 |
| Description | IAA (Impact Acceleration Account) |
| Amount | £19,997 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2013 |
| End | 03/2015 |
| Description | ICURe |
| Amount | £50,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | SETsquared Partnership |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2014 |
| End | 09/2015 |
| Description | Luxembourg |
| Organisation | University of Luxembourg |
| Country | Luxembourg |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Collaborative Research on Electronic Voting |
| Collaborator Contribution | Collaborative Research on Electronic Voting, including contributions to papers and membership of the `Academic Advisory Group' for development of an evoting system |
| Impact | Chris Culnane, James Heather, Rui Joaquim, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague: Faster Print on Demand for Prêt à Voter. EVT/WOTE 2014 Chris Culnane, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague: vVote: a Verifiable Voting System (DRAFT). CoRR abs/1404.6822 (2014) Morgan Llewellyn, Steve Schneider, Zhe Xia, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan: Testing Voters' Understanding of a Security Mechanism Used in Verifiable Voting. EVT/WOTE 2013 Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan, Vanessa Teague, Roland Wen, Zhe Xia: A Supervised Verifiable Voting Protocol for the Victorian Electoral Commission. Electronic Voting 2012: 81-94 Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague, Roland Wen, Zhe Xia, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan: Using Prêt à Voter in Victoria State Elections. EVT/WOTE 2012 Denise Demirel, Maria Henning, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Melanie Volkamer: Feasibility Analysis of Prêt à Voter for German Federal Elections. VOTE-ID 2011: 158-173 Zhe Xia, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Hugo Jonker, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve A. Schneider, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan: Versatile Prêt à Voter: Handling Multiple Election Methods with a Unified Interface. INDOCRYPT 2010: 98-114 Peter Y. A. Ryan, David Bismark, James Heather, Steve Schneider, Zhe Xia: Prêt à voter: a voter-verifiable voting system. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 4(4): 662-673 (2009) David Bismark, James Heather, Roger M. A. Peel, Steve Schneider, Zhe Xia, Peter Y. A. Ryan: Experiences Gained from the first Prêt à Voter Implementation. REVOTE 2009: 19-28 Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve A. Schneider: Prêt à Voter with Re-encryption Mixes. ESORICS 2006: 313-326 David Chaum, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve A. Schneider: A Practical Voter-Verifiable Election Scheme. ESORICS 2005: 118-139 |
| Description | Melbourne |
| Organisation | University of Melbourne |
| Country | Australia |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Collaboration on publications |
| Collaborator Contribution | Collaboration on publications, membership of an `Academic Advisory Group' for the development of an verifiable evoting system, joint chair of the Vote-ID conference 2013. |
| Impact | James Heather, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague: Cryptographic protocols with everyday objects. Formal Asp. Comput. 26(1): 37-62 (2014) Chris Culnane, James Heather, Rui Joaquim, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague: Faster Print on Demand for Prêt à Voter. EVT/WOTE 2014 Chris Culnane, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague: vVote: a Verifiable Voting System (DRAFT). CoRR abs/1404.6822 (2014) James Heather, Steve A. Schneider, Vanessa Teague (Eds.): E-Voting and Identify - 4th International Conference, Vote-ID 2013, Guildford, UK, July 17-19, 2013. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7985, Springer 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-39184-2 Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan, Vanessa Teague, Roland Wen, Zhe Xia: A Supervised Verifiable Voting Protocol for the Victorian Electoral Commission. Electronic Voting 2012: 81-94 Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Vanessa Teague, Roland Wen, Zhe Xia, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan: Using Prêt à Voter in Victoria State Elections. EVT/WOTE 2012 |
| Start Year | 2011 |
| Title | SuVote |
| Description | Backend of a verifiable voting system, for use with a customised front end. The components include: random ballot form generation; bulletin board peers; web bulletin board; encoding and decoding of votes for processing through a mixnet; utilities. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The software was used in the Victorian State Election November 2014 to capture and process votes. |
| URL | https://bitbucket.org/tvsproject |
| Company Name | Coasca Ltd |
| Description | Coasca Ltd provides software and expertise to support secure and verifiable electronic voting. It was set up out of the University of Surrey following the successful development of a system to support the November 2014 State Election in the State of Victoria, Australia. The University of Surrey has contributed the copyright of the open source software developed for the Victorian system, and owns a stake in the company. |
| Year Established | 2015 |
| Impact | The company is currently in discussion with potential clients who are interested in electronic voting. |
| Website | http://www.coasca.com/ |
| Description | Announcement on LinkedIn Group of successful delivery of world's first Verifiable Electronic Election at State level |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The announcement was to the LinkedIn group on Electronic Voting, which has 600 members around the world who are practitioners and in the Elections industry. The announcement led to a number of questions for further clarification, and also sparked a healthy debate about the pros and cons of electronic voting, the security risks, the societal benefits, and what our system had achieved. I was approached privately by someone who had read the discussion and invited to apply our system to their particular challenge, that of providing electronic voting to overseas and military voters. This opportunity is currently being followed up. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3010609&type=member&item=5947997104390553601&trk=groups... |
| Description | Article in New Statesman |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | An article on verifiable voting in the New Statesman Spotlight supplement special issue on Cyber Security. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-volt-project-voting-on-ledger-technologies-tickets-60521857505 |
| Description | CyberUK presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Technical Presentation on Distributed Ledger Technologies at CyberUK 2016 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://registration.livegroup.co.uk/cesg_cip16/ |
| Description | Invited keynote Address at 1st International Conference on Cyber Security for Sustainable Society 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Keynote address on the Victorian Election system to this conference. Led to discussions about verifiability more generally (not just in evoting but other societal systems). Has also led to interest in using our secure electronic system in a political election, and discussions are currently ongoing. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://sustainablesocietynetwork.net/th_event/cyber-security-event-1/ |
| Description | Invited talk at Vote-ID 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | An invited talk at an international conference aimed at both a technical audience and policy makers. This also included a demonstration of the system. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.voteid15.org/ |
| Description | Panel on Electronic Voting at Financial Cryptography 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Participant in a panel discussion on the use of the internet for evoting |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Presentation at the HMG Distroibuted Ledger Technoloigy Communit of Interest event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presentation about verifiable voting and about he VOLT project at the "Community of Interest on DLT's" event. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Seminar at Royal Holloway University of London |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Seminar on the development of the Web Bulletin Board, presented at Royal Holloway, to approx 30 strong audience. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Seminar at University of Southampton |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Seminar at Southampton to talk about the formal development underpinning the web bulletin board used in electronic voting |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Seminar at University of Swansea |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Presentation describing our research outputs on a Secure Electronic Voting Systems and the formal verification of the Web Bulletin Board (DLT) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Talk on Secure Electronic Voting to the Guildford Institute |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The talk sparked questions and comments about the concerns around electronic voting, and generated a lot of discussion after the talk. Local people said they were impressed with the kind of activity that the University of Surrey was doing. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/event/talk-electronic-voting/ |
| Description | Talk to GCHQ Blockchains workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This was a workshop on blockchains organised bu GCHQ and with a mix of academic, business, and government participants. Steve Schneider gave a talk on distributed ledger technologies from the voting perspective |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Youtube |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 850 views of the youtube video explaining the core design idea of the Pret a Voter verifiable voting system Enquiries and comments to me about the video, by email and in person, indicating a better understanding of the design. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrpwc7qQvE |