PNNL

Abstract

The recent explosion in the use of electronic voting machines provides a wonderful opportunity to teach students about computer security. Because voting is the cornerstone of any democracy or republic, the need for secure voting systems is obvious. Further, students are familiar with how to vote. But the complexity of mapping a traditional process of voting using secret ballots to an electronic environment shows the difficulties of implementing secure processes and systems. In this article, we show a high level mapping from selected security and privacy education outcomes into a target ‘case study’ of developing electronic voting machines intended for traditional secret ballot elections. Our intent is to motivate both a set of lessons specifically involving e-voting, as well as illustrating the usefulness of having a mapping from outcomes to simplified case studies.