IDEA: A Unifying Theory for Evaluation Systems

Secure systems for voting, exams, auctions and conference paper management are theorised to address the same problem, that of secure evaluations. In support of such a unifying theory comes a model for Secure Evaluation Systems (SES), which offers innovative common grounds to understand all four groups. For example, all rest on submissions, respectively votes, test answers, bids and papers, which are to be evaluated and ultimately ranked. A taxonomy for all groups is advanced to provide a comparative understanding of the various systems. The taxonomy is built according to the type of submissions and the type of evaluation.

The uniformity of the security requirements across all groups offers additional validation, and this is an innovative finding in the direction, currently unexplored, of a common system design. Still, the requirements may variously shape up. For example, while voter privacy is normally required forever, anonymity of the submissions is required until after the marking/evaluation phase for the test answers of an exam, for the (sealed) bids of an auction, and for the papers submitted to a conference.