Smart cards in electronic voting: lessons learned from applications in legally-binding elections and approaches proposed in scientific papers

Abstract

Recently, the interest in electronic voting has increased as more and more states have started to implement such systems. At the same time, classical national ID cards are often being replaced by national electronic ID cards which enable citizens to securely identify and authenticate themselves over the Internet. Despite their popularity, the possibility of using eID cards for e-voting has not been adequately studied. This work surveys e-voting systems in which smart cards were used or were proposed to be used to support the voting process. We consider all types of smart cards, including those only for use in e-voting as well as existing and future national eID cards. In a two-step process, we will analyze the most interesting, real-world applications and proposals from a security, usability, and cost perspective, allowing us to derive our lessons learned. Upon these lessons, we show that the restricted-ID mechanism as implemented in the German eID card serves as an interesting basis for the integration of eID cards in e-voting. We outline that the risk of a “forced-abstention” attack can be mitigated by using the restricted-ID.