Anonymity Preserving Secure Authentication for a Transparent Internet Voting Process

ABSTRACT

The COVID'19 pandemic of recent times has changed the trends of socializing, that is, from physical to online (virtual) presence. Likewise, remote or work-from-home culture has flourished and resulted in business gains with the least maintenance cost. However, the situation has its downsides, like risking users' privacy and compromising their anonymity by getting hacked, which has caused distrust in online businesses/activities. i-voting is also not indifferent, where people fear compromising their anonymity by casting votes via digital electoral. In an attempt to rebuild trust in i-voting, this research, as a test case, focuses on the security aspects of the authentication mechanisms used in the i-voting System of Estonia. It is to pledge the significance of voter authentication just before a vote gets cast because admittance to internal applications may expose the network to instant attack. Following that is the suggested remedy for the limitations observed, such as using a static e/m-ID for online transactions and limited time verifiability of their casted vote, through our proposed digital authentication mechanism, which ensures the anonymity of both the ballot and the voter and is a novel contribution to date. © 2022 IEEE.