New Approach for Online Voting Ensuring Privacy and Verifiability

Abstract

Distrust in voting is not a rare phenomenon even in developed countries. Electronic voting (e-voting), however, appeared as an alternative, but is still not practiced on a large scale. This is due to the fact that despite the huge number of articles it is not yet possible to completely ensure security, privacy and verifiability. It is hard to create a system or a protocol fulfilling all requirements, especially unconditionally.

Designing effective voting systems is challenging because these aspects often conflict with each other. There are issues that need to be resolved. For example, one of such challenges is trying to ensure identification and keep votes private while still being able to verify them. There are quite a few cryptographic schemes which fulfill wide requirements for online elections. Their only disadvantage is inconvenience: they use sophisticated cryptographic tools that make them hard to implement and require expertise in various fields.

In this paper we suggest a new approach that ensures this requirements without complex cryptographic methods. First, we propose a novel architecture for an internet voting system that incorporates steganography techniques to enhance the security of the system. In the proposed architecture steganography is used to hide the votes within the data packets transmitted between the storage, that keeps all the votes, and the counting server. The next proposed novelty is the solution of the privacy – verifiability problem using only face recognition, properties of image entropy and hash functions. The advantage of this system is ease of use without loss of security.