Will you vote online in 2020 general election?
University researchers claim to have created hacker-proof e-voting system
An electronic voting system that's claimed to be secure enough to withstand cyber attacks has been built by researchers at the University of Birmingham.
Professor Mark Ryan and his team say the system can fend off hackers from foreign countries that may try to rig an online election.
While this week's general election will record votes at polling stations and by post, Ryan believes e-voting could be introduced as early as 2020, with his Du-Vote system making it more secure.
Du-Vote works, he said, because of its simplicity: users are given a credit card-sized device similar to those used in online banking, on which they receive a voter code to type into their computer, tablet or smartphone.
"The main advantage of this system is that it splits the security between the independent security device and a voter's computer or mobile device," Ryan said.
"A computer is a hugely powerful, all-purpose machine running billions of lines of code that no one really understands, whereas the independent security device has a much, much smaller code base and is not susceptible to viruses."
The university team worked on the system for two years, and believe it offers an answer to sceptics who claim e-voting will be too susceptible to hackers.
Get the ITPro. daily newsletter
Receive our latest news, industry updates, featured resources and more. Sign up today to receive our FREE report on AI cyber crime & security - newly updated for 2024.
Team member Gurchetan Grewal said: "This is currently the only piece of work that addresses a core problem of e-voting namely, that someone may have viruses or other malware on their computer."
Around 32 per cent of PCs are infected with malware around the world, according to a 2013 report from Panda Security.
Grewal also cited Estonia's e-voting system, saying it fails to deal with hard-to-detect viruses designed to alter votes and corrupt ballots.
After running tests on their system, the team claims that even if a hostile adversary controls the entire computing infrastructure, voters and election officials would still be able to detect electoral fraud.
However, other issues including family pressure to vote a certain way, would remain despite any sophisticated system designed to thwart hackers.
Read IT Pro's analysis of the prospect of e-voting here.
Want developers to build secure software? You need to ditch these two programming languages
Sundar Pichai says more than 25% of Google's code is now generated by AI – and it's a big glimpse into the future of software development
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen11 review: A smart little server for small spaces