Remote voting is often cited as a potential solution to make elections more convenient, increase voter participation, and reduce administrative costs. In recent years, jurisdictions around the world, such as Switzerland, Estonia and Australia, have expressed interest in moving to Internet voting as an alternative to absentee or poll site voting. In the United States, one type of remote voting, vote-by-mail, has allowed the states of Washington and Oregon to nearly eliminate poll sites for elections. While Internet voting will probably not replace polling place voting in the near future, there may be instances in which Internet voting has certain advantages, e.g. for deployed military personal or overseas citizens (UOCAVA). Voice Recognization based voting systems was mainly designed for military personal and overseas citizens which do not have access to a regular polling site. Internet voting may introduce vulnerabilities that are different from the potential problems in a polling place setting, or in mail voting. Security analyses of Internet voting systems have identified a number of potential security issues with using personal computers to cast votes online.
The computer used by the voter is not under the control of the election authority. It could be infected with malicious software (malware) that can spy on how the vote is cast,or change the vote during the casting process. Since a private voting booth does not exist, voters could be subject to improper influence from human coercers. In addition, voter authentication may be problematic, since voters may not have credentials that can safely be used for authentication in a remote setting. In particular, voters may give their voting credentials to someone else, effectively selling their votes.
Voice Recognization based voting systems provides a novel technique that addresses the malware problem, the voter authentication problem, as well as the possibility of massive coercion via the selling of credentials. Small scale coercion, such as coercion by a family member or someone being physically present next to the voter, is still possible. Ensuring that a computer is virus-free is virtually impossible. The constant battle between the anti-virus industry and programmers that write malware is well-known. There are a number of techniques that malware developers use to avoid detection, including self-modification and disabling antivirus software. Computer viruses can go undetected, because they can minimally impact the computer’s operation and can delete themselves immediately after they ran the first time. Operating systems, bootstrapping software, and other essential software can come with such a virus already installed, and would avoid detection, since such a program has complete control over the computer, preventing any anti-virus software from inspecting it.
Voice Recognization based voting systems bypasses the virus problem. It allows the voter to confidently cast a ballot from any computer, without being afraid that a virus or any software can adversely influence her choices. Voice Recognization based voting systems are radically different from traditional methods to secure client computers, such as installing and constantly updating antivirus software, or booting from a secure read-only media. Even if such methods would be effective, the election officials do not have any means of verifying that the voter complied and used the recommended secure platform. As the election officials are responsible for ensuring that only legitimate voters cast ballots, and the true intentions of the voters are collected, their security assumptions cannot be based on the average voter being an expert at running a secure computational platform.
Voice Recognization based voting systems has some of the properties which are desired for an Internet voting system. These properties are based, in part, on the following assumptions:
1. There exist a class of problems which can be generated by a computer, such that, given a problem, it is easy for a human to find its solution, but it is essentially impossible for a computer program to find its solution. Normally referred as CAPTCHAs.
2. Given a set of CAPCHAs and a solution which is known to be for one of the CAPTCHAs, a computer program cannot associate the given solution to any of the CAPTCHAs, with a probability better than random guessing.
3. Given a sample human voice, a fixed text and a human voice reading the given text, there exists a computer program which can say if the two voice samples come from the same human or not (speaker verification).
4. It is difficult for a computer program to synthesize the voice of a given human reading a given text.
5. There exists a computer program that takes as input a set of texts and a voice recording of a human reading one of the given texts, and outputs the text which is read in the recording (voice recognition).
6. The list of registered voters is accurate and public.
7. The voters’ computers have a working microphone.
Voice Recognization based voting systems offers the following properties:
1. Voters can cast their ballots using their personal computers connected to the Internet.
2. No computer program can modify the vote cast by the voter, regardless if it is running on the voter’s computer, on the server of the election authorities or on any other computer.
3. No human can modify the vote cast by the voter. In particular, election officials cannot modify or inject votes.
4. Only authorized voters can cast ballots. In particular, an authorized voter cannot pass her voting credentials to another entity. Also, the election officials cannot stuff the ballot box.
5. No computer program can figure out how the voter voted without the help of a human, with one exception: the server of the election authorities can figure out how a voter voted.
6. The voter cannot loose or forget her voting credentials.
7. Voice Recognization based voting systems can be combined with a universally verifiably tallying method (e.g. decryption mixnet, homomorphic tallying , punchscanian mixnet) which allow anyone to check that all the votes have been tallied as recorded.
Voice Recognization based voting systems is a voting system that goes back to voting via voce. Speaker verification along with voice recognition are used to authenticate a voter and identify the vote she wants to cast. Even if the voter’s computer is infected with viruses, it cannot synthesize the voice of the voter for the random text that is associated with a candidate, and thus cannot modify the voter’s vote. From the available biometric authentication techniques, speaker verification was used because the challenge response nature of it ensures that replay attacks are not possible. Voice Recognization based voting systems can be coupled with any end-to-end publicly verifiable scheme that allows voters to check that their vote is recorded correctly and allows everyone to check that all votes were correctly tallied.
Voice ID relies on the fact that vocal characteristics, like fingerprints and the patterns of people's...