Maina M. Olembo

User study of the improved Helios voting system interfaces

There is increasing interest in cryptographic verifiability in remote electronic voting schemes. Helios is one example of an open-source implementation. In previous work, we proposed an improved version of the original Helios interface in version 3.1 for vote casting and individual verifiability. We now test this interface in a mock mayoral election set up with 34 users. Users are given instructions and fill out questionnaires before and after the vote casting process. Data on mouse movements and time is collected and a modified helmet with eye tracking lenses is used to capture eye movement data. The study shows that the interface is easy to use while people have difficulty understanding the motivation for and the concept of verifiability.

Helios Verification: To Alleviate, or to Nominate: Is That The Question, Or Shall We Have Both?

Helios is an end-to-end verifiable remote electronic voting system which has been used for elections in academic contexts. It allows voters to verify that their vote was cast, and included in the final tally, as intended. User studies have shown that voters are unlikely to perform this verification, probably due to the effortful and cumbersome manual steps that are required by the system. To address this challenge, we propose, in this paper, two improvements: the first is to ameliorate the cumbersome nature of the verification process as much as possible. We offer two suggestions for doing this. To accommodate voters who have no interest in verifying, we propose a further improvement: delegation. This will allow voters to nominate a trusted third party to perform the verification on their behalf as and when they cast their vote. Hence no extra effort is required, and we can exploit existing trust in public institutions to provide voters with the assurance that the voting process is indeed honest and above board. In addition to providing end-to-end verifiability in a less effortful manner, we provide stored as cast and tallied as stored verifiability as well, for voters who do not wish to verify their own votes.

Introducing Verifiability in the POLYAS Remote Electronic Voting System

Remote electronic voting continues to attract attention. A greater number of election officials are opting to enable a remote electronic voting channel. More and more scientific papers have been published introducing or improving existing remote electronic voting protocols. However, while the scientific papers focus on different aspects of verifiability, most of the systems in use do not provide verifiability. This gap is closed in this paper by extending a widely used remote electronic voting system, the POLYAS system, to provide verifiability. This approach has been tested in the 2010 election of the German Society for Computer Scientists and will be applied in future elections.

Developing and testing SCoP – a visual hash scheme

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to develop and test SCoP. Users find comparing long meaningless strings of alphanumeric characters difficult. While visual hashes – where users compare images rather than strings – have been proposed as an alternative, people are unable to sufficiently distinguish more than 30 bits, which does not provide adequate security against collision attacks. Our goal is to improve the situation. Design/methodology/approach – A visual hash scheme was developed using shapes, colours, patterns and position parameters. It was evaluated in a series of pilot user studies and improved iteratively, leading to SCoP, which encodes 60 distinguishable bits. We tested SCoP further in two follow-up studies, simulating verifying in remote electronic voting and https certificate validation. Findings – Participants attained an average accuracy rate of 97 per cent with SCoP when comparing two visual hash images, one placed above the other. From the follow-up studies, SCoP was seen to be more ...