Protection profile for secure e-voting systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a protection profile for e-voting systems. Currently, there are three protection profiles for e-voting systems, BSI-PP-0031 in Germany, PP-CIVIS in France, and IEEE P1583 in USA. Although these protection profiles consider the overall security requirements for e-voting systems, they did not consider the voter verifiable audit trail. The voter verifiable audit trail allows voters to verify that their votes were captured correctly. Moreover, it provides a means to audit the stored electronic results, and to detect possible election fraud. Today, several voter verifiable audit trail e-voting systems already exist in the market, and used in public elections. However, a protection profile does not reflect this situation. Therefore, it is required that a protection profile for e-voting systems should consider the voter verifiability. To accomplish this, we propose a protection profile considering the voter verifiability with the existing protection profiles, and then discuss voter verifiability issues related to the electoral process. The proposed protection profile can be used to increase reliability of the entire e-voting process and tabulation result. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.