The Security Analysis of e-Voting in Japan
To assess trustworthiness of e-voting practices in Japan, security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures are analyzed. All e-voting systems available on the market are covered in the analysis. Through the analysis we concluded that current
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Abstract. To assess trustworthiness of e-voting practices in Japan, security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures are analyzed. All e-voting systems available on the market are covered in the analysis. Through the analysis we concluded that current e-voting security is heavily depending on protection by operational process rather than security features of the system and it is confirmed that the systems provide only limited security features and there is large room for technical improvement. Typical security issues are lack of protection mechanism of programs and data on tabulation machines. This vulnerability enables malicious poll worker or manufacturer to insert malicious code to generate arbitrary election results. Keywords: e-voting, e-voting system, e-voting operation.
Background E-voting, an election method that allows voters to directory record electronic voting data on an electronic media, is spreading in various countries around the world. In general e-voting is thought to contribute to a higher turnout rate in elections, swift tabulation, cost reduction, and better accessibility for disabled voters. Countries such as the U.S., UK, Brazil, and India have already deployed e-voting widely [6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16]. Korea and Estonia are applying more advanced methods of Internet voting. However, various problems such as technical failure, security problems, etc. have already been pointed out in real elections. Many researchers and the media have repeated security issues around e-voting [4, 5]. In Japan, only local elections are allowed to use e-voting by law at this time. The discussion of introducing e-voting into national elections in the Diet was just initiated in 2007. There is a possibility that adoption of e-voting will be approved by law in 2008.
1 Introduction 1.1 Objective To assess trustworthiness of e-voting in Japan, we investigated the reliability and security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures by election officials in Japan, and analyzed them from the viewpoint of information security. The practice of e-voting in A. Alkassar and M. Volkamer (Eds.): VOTE-ID 2007, LNCS 4896, pp. 99–110, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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H. Hisamitsu and K. Takeda
Japan is still at the initial stages and this research would be the first trial to comprehensively assess e-voting in Japan. There have been many research projects on e-voting systems conducted especially in the U.S. [13]. We recognized that those researches are mostly to identify security flaws on hardware and/or software of e-voting machines. The e-voting system consists of e-voting machine, registration machine and tabulation machine. The researches of three types of machines are required to establish secure e-voting systems effectively. Although such research contribute to establish secure e-voting, in reality security of e-voting can be kept by both security features of e-voting systems and the operational procedures or management of the election by the officials. We have not found existing resea
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