Electronic Voting

Overview

As a semester-long independent project, Mark Dalton investigated the cryptographic techniques that are utilized to construct a secure electronic election. This culminated in the development of a website that allows a fair electronic election to be conducted.

The properties that are preserved by the system are:

• correctness
• verifiability and auditability
• anonymity of voters
• uniqueness (one vote per voter; requires authentication)
• non-coercibility

The cryptographic tools that had to be learned included: zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and mix-nets.

Student

Mark Dalton ’20, Computer Science 

Instructors

Zach Kissel ’05, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Assignment Type

Independent study project

Languages/Code/Programs/Technology Used

• The protocol was implemented in Java using Spring
• The web technologies used, beyond Spring, were JavaScript and HTML
• Authentication was done using the OAuth.