The Realities of E-Voting Security (September/October 2012)

Final submissions due to ScholarOne: 2 January 2012

Please email the guest editors an extended abstract describing the article you plan to submit by 15 December 2011. 

As election processes become more automated, the risk of software-based threats increases proportionally, or maybe exponentially. In 2010, a pilot project that exercised electronic ballot return over the Internet was successfully hacked during the public test period. Internet voting opponents hailed the event as confirmation of their warnings about the inherent insecurity of voting over a public network while proponents dismissed the hack as a preventable incident in the early phases of incorporating new and powerful technology into US elections.

Research in progressive approaches to e-voting is clearly evolving at a revolutionary pace. Creative voting systems that leverage paper-based puzzles and invisible ink supplement the more mainstream research in cryptographic voting systems based on homomorphism. Traditional e-voting systems, such as touchscreen and optical scan voting systems, continue to mature in their design and implementation and remain in widespread use.

This special issue is devoted to novel research, case studies, and fact-based insight into e-voting security in government elections. We seek articles that explore the security and privacy opportunities and threats of e-voting systems, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Secure software and high-assurance software
• Assessing risks to the voting system and to the societies that rely on it
• Novel software or hardware attacks on existing or proposed systems 
• Empirical evaluation of e-voting system security
• Security issues in Internet voting
• Secure end-to-end (E2E) voting systems
• Cryptographic voting systems
• Receipt-freeness and other privacy-preserving technologies
• Operational practicalities of fielding an effective e-voting system
• Electronic auditing and forensics
• Standards for voting system security
• Pilot project reports
• Case studies highlighting practices to be applauded and avoided
• Taxonomies or surveys of the above topics

The above list is neither complete nor closed. Articles need not be novel research, but they must reflect the state of the art in a way that’s interesting to our readership.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions will be subject to the IEEE Computer Society’s peer-review process. Extended abstracts should not exceed 2,000 words. Articles themselves will not exceed 6,000 and have no more than 15 references. Articles should be understandable to a broad audience of people interested in security and privacy. The writing style should be down to earth, practical, and original. Authors should not assume that the audience will have specialized experience in a particular subfield. All accepted articles will be edited according to the IEEE Computer Society style guide. Submit abstracts to the guest editors, and submit your papers to Scholar­One at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee.

Visit our Author Center for information about the magazine, including article guidelines.

Questions?

Contact Guest Editors Alec Yasinsac, University of South Alabama (yasinsac@gmail.com) and Michael Shamos, Carnegie Mellon University (shamos@cs.cmu.edu).