Designing for audit: A voting machine with a tiny TCB

Abstract

Thoroughly auditing voting machine software has proved to be difficult, and even efforts to reduce its complexity have relied on significant amounts of external code. We design and implement a device that allows a voter to confirm and cast her vote while trusting only 1,034 lines of ARM assembly. The system, which we develop from scratch, supports visually (and hearing) impaired voters and ensures the privacy of the voter as well as the integrity of the tally under some common assumptions. We employ several techniques to increase the readability of our code and make it easier to audit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.