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Verifiable Electronic Voting: Making it Real

Steve Schneider ( University of Surrey )
  • 10Nov
    14:00 10th November 2015 ( week 5, Michaelmas Term 2015 )
    Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
In November 2014 the world¹s first use of an end-to-end verifiable voting system in a State election took place in the State of Victoria, Australia. A team from the University of Surrey led the development of the verifiability back-end. The core of the system design was the Pret a Voter verifiable voting scheme originally proposed in 2005, but its implementation required a number of significant enhancements, elaborations and new protocols in order to make it workable in practice and meet the election's specific needs, while maintaining the key property of verifiability. In this talk I will describe the development of the system from a proposal in an academic paper through to a production system, and explain the new elements that needed to be introduced. I will also report on the use of the system in the November 2014 State of Victoria election.

Speaker bio

Steve joined the Department of Computer Science in September 2004 and was Head of Department 2004-2010. He is currently Director of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, which was awarded GCHQ Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research in 2015. Steve is also Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, having taken the role on in January 2015.

His research interests lie in the areas of security and in formal modeling and verification. His work on secure electronic voting has led to the development of a verifiable voting system used in the November 2014 State election in the State of Victoria, Australia. Steve has also been working on robustness and distributed trust in situations where it is important not to rely on the trustworthiness of any single individual. Earlier work in security was in the area of formal modelling and verification of security protocols, and in non-interference. In particular Steve has developed methods for describing protocols between components interacting in an insecure environment, and to proving that they provide key authentication and confidentiality properties.

In the area of formal modelling Steve has been working with Helen Treharne and collaborators in Swansea on developing new methods and tools for verifying safety for railway track plans. He is interested in scalability of the methods, enabling them to manage the complexity of real track plans.

 

 

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