Verifiable Classroom Voting

Feng HaoSchool of Computing Science

Newcastle University

Learning and Teaching Seminar (13 Nov, 2012)

Background

• UTLSEC innovation project (Jun-Aug, 2012)– Aim: verifiable classroom voting based on using

smart phones as voting clients– By comparison, TurningPoint classroom voting

system is not verifiable.– TurningPoint also relies on using proprietary

hardware for voting clients and server

Overview of our system

• Publicly verifiable without having to trust admin/teacher

• Students use their own devices to vote

• Voting can happen at anywhere as long as Internet is available

Web server

Voting clients (iPhones, Android phones etc)

Internet

Demo

• Three ways to vote– Android phone/tablet: search for “Newcastle

University eVoting”in Google play and install the app– iPhone/iPad: search for “Newcastle University

eVoting” in the app store and install the app– All other smart phones, laptops, Visit

http://evoting.ncl.ac.uk• To participate in voting, try– Session ID: 48– Passcode: 1234

Verifiable classroom voting

• We believe it is the first such in the world– State-of-the-art verifiable e-voting technologies all

require trustworthy authorities to do the tallying– Unrealistic to find such authorities in classroom

voting• The core technology underneath our solution– Self-enforcing e-voting (Hao, Kreeger, 2010)– Goes beyond the current state-of-the-art– Ground-breaking nature recognized by the recent

award of 2012 ERC Starting Grant (1.5m euros)

Acknowledgements

• Hard work by two students over summer• Mr Carlton Shepherd– Currently a CS Stage 3 student– Developed the Android app

• Dr Dylan Clarke– Currently an RA– Developed the iPhone app and web server

Thank you