SEAS, a secure e-voting protocol: Design and implementation

This paper presents SEAS, the Secure E-voting Applet System, a protocol for implementing a secure system for polling over computer networks, usable in distributed organizations whose members may range up to dozens of thousands. We consider an architecture requiring the minimum number of servers involved in the validation and voting phases. Sensus, [Cranor L, Cytron RK. Sensor: a security-conscious electronic polling system for the internet. In: Proceedings of HICSS'97. IEEE; 1997. p. 561-70], a well-known e-voting protocol, requires only two servers, namely a validator and a tallier. Even if satisfying most of the security requirements of an e-voting system, Sensus suffers from a vulnerability that allows one of the entities involved in the election process to cast its own votes in place of those that abstain from the vote. SEAS is a portable and flexible system that preserves the limited number of servers of Sensus, but it avoids the mentioned vulnerability. We propose a prototype implementation of SEAS based on Java applet and XML technology.