A distributed network architecture for robust Internet voting systems

Web-based Internet voting services cannot be provided in a reliable manner where a publicly visible website forms the basis of interacting with voters and collecting votes, as the service cannot resist a distributed denial of service attack. The problem is a profound one for all interactive web services, however, an Internet voting session is a well defined and quite simple interaction and an interactive service similar to web-based voting is proposed. This architecture uses a P2P web cache as the source of a Java voting applet. The applet interacts with the voter via their web browser to collect a vote. The applet then uses a common P2P file sharing network to deposit encrypted votes for collection by the electoral returning officer. The issues of how to authenticate voters and how to provide receipting in such an asynchronous system are described along with premininary findings using a large P2P network established for this purpose. A successful demonstration of this approach may have implications for other mission critical web services which must collect information.