RAPID: Secure Bulletin Boards and Absentee Voting in Real-World Independently-Verifiable Elections

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The City of Takoma Park, MD made election history in November 2009 by holding the first independently-verifiable secret-ballot public election. Voters could, for the first time anywhere in the world, independently audit a secret-ballot governmental election using the Scantegrity voting system. This project improves on two aspects of the system used by Takoma Park in 2009. First, it provides an absentee voting protocol, Remotegrity, which enables absentee voters to benefit from the system?s verifiability properties. The protocol is designed to be simple enough for use in a real-world public election. Protocol properties are defined and proven rigorously, using the techniques of cryptographic proofs. Second, it improves upon the security of the election website by using the Composite component-based OS for a secure foundation. The website adapts to faults and compromises by dynamically decreasing the exposure of different clients to each other, thus preventing data corruption and resource starvation. The research provides a detailed design of a secure bulletin board for elections that goes beyond an abstract description of the cryptographic protocols used, decreasing the security vulnerabilities of the bulletin board. In particular, it makes the bulletin board less vulnerable to attempts by malicious clients to change the posted digital election audit trail or to launch massive denial-of-service attacks. The research is urgent because it is being considered for use in the November 2011 municipal election of the City of Takoma Park, MD, by its Board of Elections and City Council.