Led by Professor Mark Ryan researchers at the University of Birmingham in Great Britain have been working on an online voting system for the past two years. This past April, the team finally introduced a new technique which may allow voters to cast their votes online even if their computer is currently infected with a virus. The researchers under Ryan are massively knowledgeable on such matters. Some, like Gurchetan Grewal, even have PhDs in online voting. When this goes through, England will not be the first country in the world to utilize online voting. Estonia and some U.S. states, albeit with less security precautions, are already doing it.
This particular technique is said to work by a person’s computer working together with their hardware. Each voter will receive a credit-card sized object. This “card” is actually a small electronic device on which the voter will receive a personalized code. The voter will then type this code into his or her computer or mobile device. This code will, in effect, synchronize the voter’s computer directly with their system so that a vote may be cast. If online voting were to become a possibility in Great Britain, it would have to have the very best security and privacy known.
In particular, the researches feared that malware fraudsters could develop a new kind of malware that specifically altered online votes. Many of the newer breeds of malware are especially threatening because they are completely undetectable. These are the sort of dangers the team needed to eradicate. To do this, the researchers based its research on already extant internet security technology and created their very own security system. They believed this needed to be done just in case any or all the security systems were created with the help of a person or persons who would in turn betray that knowledge.
This may have been unnecessary in itself. However, their efforts to create a brand new security system has really paid off. The end product is a system that is completely impervious to viruses or online hacking. So as already mentioned a person who is voting from a computer or mobile devise already compromised with a virus, can still safely use the system without harming it. All who governmental and criminal agencies who wish to do the system harm will be out of luck. This new development means that this e-voting technique which will be called Du-Vote will be a possibility by the 2020 election.
The article put together by the research team called “Du-Vote: Remote Electronic Voting with Untrusted Computers” will be presented this July to the Computer Security Foundations Symposium. Many computer experts from around the world remain very skeptical. Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist at SRI International says we are at least ten years away from any possibility of a truly secure online voting. Many of these critics say that the best and most secure technology needed does not yet exist. All are pretty sure that at some point within this century it will indeed become reality.
