Recently, a multidisciplinary group of Mexican researchers coming from different universities have developed a voting system suitable for mobile devices with Android Operating System (López García et al.  Rev.Fac.Ing. Univ. Antioquia, 2014, 72: 9-19).

The system is composed of three entities: the authentication server, the voting server and the voter which runs on an android smartphone.  Two short messages, between the voter and the authentication server are necessary to generate an electronic ballot. To cast a vote, a message containing the ballot is sent from the voter to the voter server.

Mobile platform developed for Internet voting

In this voting system two cryptographic libraries were developed, one for the servers and other for the Android smartphone. Bilinear pairing functions were used to verify the signatures contained in the electronic ballot.

The implementation of the library in both entities guarantee the integrity of the vote and the anonymity of the voter using digital signatures and blind signatures based on bilinear pairings.

In the preliminary trials, measured transmission times corresponding to the messages were in the order of milliseconds units. The time consumed by cryptographic operations on the Android smartphone was also very short compared with other implementations. Noteworthy, the most expensive operation –bilinear pairing- is only executed on servers-side. Thereby, this new voting system offers a reliable election through a secure and efficient electronic voting protocol.

On the other hand, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia are currently studying the viability of developing electronic voting applications over smartphone devices supporting the Android, Blackberry and iOS platforms.

Specifically a study is being conducted to find and analyze the characteristics of the existing cryptographic tools, including both native capabilities of the mobile operating system and third-party libraries, such as Bouncy Castle, IAIK, FlexiCore, Crypto++ or OpenSSL.

Source: http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/430/43031750002.pdf

http://upcommons.upc.edu/pfc/handle/2099.1/21330

 

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Mobile platform developed for Internet voting