10-04-2017, 09:16 PM
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Introduction
Mobile voting systems have the potential to improve traditional voting procedures by providing added convenience and flexibility to the voter. Numerous electronic voting schemes have been proposed in the past, but most of them have failed to provide voter authentication in an efficient and transparent way. On the other hand, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is the most widely used mobile networking standard. There are more than one billion GSM users worldwide that represent a large user potential, not just for mobile telephony, but also for other mobile applications that exploit the mature GSM infrastructure.
In this project, an electronic voting scheme using GSM mobile technology is presented. By integrating an electronic voting scheme with the GSM infrastructure, we are able to exploit existing GSM authentication mechanisms and provide enhanced voter authentication and mobility while maintaining voter privacy.
INTRODUCTION
In democratic societies, voting is an important tool to collect and reflect people s opinions. Traditionally, voting is conducted in centralised or distributed places called voting booths. Voters go to voting booths and cast their votes under the supervision of authorised parties. The votes are then counted manually once the election has finished. With the rapid development of computer technology and cryptographic methods, electronic voting system has been employed that replace the inefficient and most importantly error-prone human component. To increase the efficiency and accuracy of voting procedures, computerised voting systems were developed to help collecting and counting the votes. These include Lever Voting Machines, Punched Cards for Voting, Optical Mark-Sense Scanners and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting Systems.
For a variety of reasons, voters may be unable to attend voting booths physically, but need to vote remotely, for example, from home or while travelling abroad. Hence, there is great demand for remote voting procedures that are easy, transparent, and, most importantly, secure. Today, the most common way for remote voting is postal voting, where voters cast their votes by post. However, it lacks proper authentication and involves a time-consuming procedure. Internet voting was introduced to provide more flexibility. Because of the inherited security vulnerabilities of the Internet and computerised systems in general, Internet voting incurred a wide range of criticism. In this project, we endeavour to improve mobility and address security problems of remote voting procedures and systems. We present an electronic voting scheme using GSM. With more than one billion users, the GSM authentication infrastructure is the most widely deployed authentication mechanism by far.
We make use of this well-designed GSM authentication infrastructure to improve mobility and security of mobile voting procedures. In our proposed scheme, voters are authenticated by their GSM mobile operators, and the votes are sent using GSM wireless communication. Voters and their votes cannot be linked and votes remain secret until the final counting. In this section, we introduce our GSM mobile voting scheme. In this scheme, GSM is used for the voting system to introduce voter mobility and provide voter authentication.