The objective of this paper is to provide a free open-source electronic voting (e-voting) system that works over the Internet. This is in contrast to many proprietary systems that hide their code, making auditing and evaluation impossible.

Kiayias, Korman, and Walluck’s system uses a bulletin board, “a public channel with memory, where all authenticated users ... can append data.” For the database, “authentication is performed by a Kerberos-like ‘gatekeeper’ server.”

The paper also details protocols for interacting with this database, including the ElGamal encryption system and threshold encryption schemes. The authors list several vulnerabilities, including distributed key generation, voter verifiability, viruses, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

The system addresses several known problems with voting systems. It has a number of innovative features worthy of further study by the cryptographic community.