SaTC: CORE: Small: A Robust Framework with Rigorous Semantics and Security Guarantees for Election-Day Voter Check-in

2016年和2020年总统选举中使用的电子选举系统的完整性和安全性受到广泛关注，这突出表明有必要对设计和实施这类系统采取严格的科学办法。虽然大量研究致力于选票、选票汇总和审计的电子处理，但使选民能够在选举日投票并确保“一选民一票”的第一步尚未成为充分研究的目标。此外，2018年，美国国家科学院、工程院和医学院投票未来委员会对使用电子投票簿表示严重关切和风险。这个项目的重点是选举中的选民登记问题，这一领域令人惊讶地没有得到从事电子选举系统工作的研究人员的关注。该项目的创新之处在于为电子签到系统建立了严格的科学基础，并在此基础上建立了以人为中心的参考实施，反映了对这类系统的法律要求。该项目具有更广泛的意义和重要性，可通过开发和提供可用于构建安全可靠的电子投票系统的技术，为纳税人节省大量资金。该项目从三个方面着手：(A)社会政治；(B)软件基础；(C)系统实施和评价。该项目推动了解决电子签到挑战的最先进水平，该项目包括开发一个参考实施，作为概念验证并用于评价目的。由此产生的系统将是一个安全和值得信赖的电子投票解决方案，其主要目的是确保在选举日“一名选民，一票”。电子投票系统本质上是一种动态分布式系统，其中多个登记设备和/或服务器必须协同工作，以提供具有安全性、完整性和可审核性的“一选民一票”保证，并且尽管可能发生故障并需要在运行中动态地重新配置该分布式系统。这样的系统代表了分布式计算中几个困难问题的汇聚，因为这包括：需要达成共识，需要为可用性和容错进行复制，需要保证数据的一致性和寿命，需要安全操作，需要保证所有执行的正确性，需要因为故障或性能原因动态地发展系统。同样重要的是，电子民意调查不是理论上的努力，而是数字时代我们民主进程的重要组成部分。该项目开发并将提供构建以人为中心、以严格研究为基础的电子投票簿系统的技术。该项目涉及研究生，他们由调查人员指导，参与研究电子选举系统中至关重要的安全和完整性问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broad concerns surrounding the integrity and security of electronic election systems used in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections underscored the need for a rigorous scientific approach to designing and implementing such systems. While substantial research has been dedicated to electronic processing of ballots, vote aggregation, and audits, the very first step that enables voters to cast their votes on Election Day and that ensures the “one voter, one vote” imperative has not been the target of sufficient research. Moreover, in 2018 the Committee on the Future of Voting of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine expressed serious concerns and risks associated with the use of electronic pollbooks. This project focuses on the problem of voter check-in in elections, an area that received surprisingly little attention from the community of researchers working on electronic election systems. The project’s novelties are the development of a rigorous scientific foundation for electronic check-in systems and the construction on that basis of a human-centric reference implementation that reflects the legal requirements for such systems. The project's broader significance and importance are potentially substantial savings to the taxpayer by developing and making available the technology ready to be used in constructing secure and trustworthy electronic poll book systems. This project proceeds along three dimensions: (a) socio-political, (b) software foundations, and (c) system implementation and evaluation. The project advances the state of the art in addressing the electronic check-in challenges, and the project includes the development of a reference implementation, serving as a proof of concept and used for evaluation purposes. The resulting system will be a secure and trustworthy electronic pollbook solution whose main purpose is to ensure "one voter, one vote" on Election Day. An electronic pollbook system is an inherently a dynamic distributed system where multiple check-in devices and/or servers must operate in concert in providing “one voter, one vote” guarantee, with security, integrity and auditability, and despite possible failures and the resulting need to dynamically reconfigure this distributed system on the fly. Such a system represents a convergence of several difficult problems in distributed computing as this includes: the need to reach consensus, the need to replicate for availability and fault-tolerance, the challenge of guaranteeing data consistency and longevity, the requirement for secure operation, the need to guarantee correctness in all executions, the ability to dynamically evolve the systems either because of failure or for reasons of performance. Equally importantly, electronic pollbooks is not a theoretical endeavor, but an important component of our democratic process in the digital age. This project develops and will make available the technology for constructing electronic poll book systems that are human-centric and that are based on rigorous research. The project involves graduate students, who are mentored by the investigators, and who are involved in research on the critically important problems of security and integrity in electronic election systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.