Paper Review: Mobile Implementation and formal verification of an e-voting system

Authors: Stefano Campanelli, Allessandro Falleni, Fabio Martinelli, Marinella Petrocchi, Anna Vaccarelli
In 2008, they have proposed M-SEAS a mobile e-voting protocol that enables people to cast their votes from the majority of mobile devices, obviously including cellular phones which support Java technology. This implementation fulfills one of the important goals of e-voting, mobility. Some important aspects of this paper can be listed as follows:
• M-SEAS fixes a well-known vulnerability of a well known e-voting protocol SENSUS, that basically allows an adversary to cast votes of eligible users that, although registered, abstain to vote.
• In order to prove the correctness of M-SEAS a formal verification is performed in the paper.
• One of the most important contribution of the paper is that it presents us a real-life e-voting application based on mobile phones.
Some drawbacks can be as follows: an asymetric encryption schema utilized which needs heavy computational requirements. Although it is claimed that today’s mobile devices have capacity to do those computations faster, there is another issue of spending scarce resources such as the battery of those hend-held devices. Hence, we believe that the efficiency of the protocols used in the devices having limitted resouces should always be taken into consideration. Another drawback is that digital certificate is transfered from PC through Bluetooth. As we know that today’s technology let us to embed digital certificate in the SIM card which a more secure metodology.

Paper Review: Secure Electronic Voting for Mobile Communications

Authors: Xun Yi, Pietro Cerone, Yanchun Zhang
In 2006 X. Yi et.al has proposed a secure electronic election scheme based on blind signature for mobile communication environments. As one of the most important problems is the limitted resources on mobile devices, they have tried to increase the efficiency of the cryptographic operations by implementing a “Modular Square Root” technique. By this technique, a mobile voter needs to compute at most 7 modular multiplications plus one modular inversion. When compared to the previous protocols proposed for standart PCs such as Fujiko-Okamota-Ohta scheme, this schema requires much less computations in mobile voter thereby is more suited for implementation on portable communication devices with limited computational capacities and resources. Their schema meets completeness, soundness, privacy, unreuseability, eligibility, fairness and verifiability but not uncoercibility. And although they have proposed a secure schema, they have not mentioned anything about the implementation and other security issues i.e. how to prevent the security issues with the OS of those portable communication devices.

Paper Review: An electronic voting protocol with deniable authentication for mobile Adhoc Networks

Authors: Chu-Ta Li, Min-Shiang Hwang, Chi-Yu Liu
In this paper a secure e-voting schema has been proposed by C.Li et. al. in 2008 For mobile and ad hoc networks. They targets especially local and small size e-voting practices such as a decision making voting within a company. In their solution they have utilized denial authentication encryption which means that the integrity of a given message should be verified only by an intended receiver and the intended receiver cannot prove the source of the given messageto any third party, even if he/she fully cooperates with the third party. The advantage of denial authentication is that it provides freedom from coercion in e-voting systems over insecure networks.