Secure Architectures for a Three-Stage Polling Place Electronic Voting System

Security on electronic voting systems is fundamental; it must assure the integrity of all the elements involved or generated during a voting process. This paper presents a design of secure architectures for providing security, integrity and authenticity of the most important elements involved in an electoral process: configuration files, recorded votes and final result files. Also, different cryptographic protocols for assuring security properties of configuration and final result files are presented as a part of one of the layers of the architectures. We consider a polling place electronic voting system composed by three stages and the use of three different systems during the whole process. Our analysis of architectures and protocols shows that the designed elements assure the secure properties which an electronic voting system must fulfill.