Election Security-by-Design

Security engineering is about improving the security of an existing software system by adding security controls to the implementation. In this paper we argue, that for election technologies, simply adding security controls is not enough. The only way to design an election system is ensure that it is fundamentally secure by carefully crafting a cryptographic voting protocol, a technique that is also called security-by-design. The more secure a system the more we can trust the result and the more easily we can defend against defamation and disinformation campaigns. Both properties, defense against cyber attacks and defense against disinformation are critical as past elections have demonstrated.