A Trust-Centric Approach To Quantifying Maturity and Security in Internet Voting Protocols

2024-12-13

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Internet voting protocols lack standardized, rigorous evaluation criteria for security and maturity, and existing comparative analyses neglect socio-technical trust dimensions essential for policymaker adoption. Method: We propose the Trust-Centric Electronic Voting Maturity Framework (EVMF), the first unified maturity scoring system integrating security assumptions, technical complexity, usability, and decentralization trade-offs—mapping multidimensional attributes onto a comparable, single-dimensional trust-centered metric. The framework is designed for cross-domain generalizability, including digital identity, Layer-2 scalability, and federated data systems. Contribution/Results: Applying EVMF to systematically assess 16 state-of-the-art internet voting protocols, we deliver an extensible, policy-oriented decision-support tool. This work establishes the first structured alignment between technical capabilities and governance requirements—enabling evidence-based protocol selection grounded in holistic trust assessment rather than isolated technical benchmarks.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Voting
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

Voting is a cornerstone of collective participatory decision-making in contexts ranging from political elections to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Despite the proliferation of internet voting protocols promising enhanced accessibility and efficiency, their evaluation and comparison are complicated by a lack of standardized criteria and unified definitions of security and maturity. Furthermore, socio-technical requirements by decision makers are not structurally taken into consideration when comparing internet voting systems. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a trust-centric maturity scoring framework to quantify the security and maturity of sixteen internet voting systems. A comprehensive trust model analysis is conducted for selected internet voting protocols, examining their security properties, trust assumptions, technical complexity, and practical usability. In this paper we propose the electronic voting maturity framework (EVMF) which supports nuanced assessment that reflects real-world deployment concerns and aids decision-makers in selecting appropriate systems tailored to their specific use-case requirements. The framework is general enough to be applied to other systems, where the aspects of decentralization, trust, and security are crucial, such as digital identity, Ethereum layer-two scaling solutions, and federated data infrastructures. Its objective is to provide an extendable toolkit for policy makers and technology experts alike that normalizes technical and non-technical requirements on a univariate scale.

Problem

• Lack of standardized criteria for evaluating internet voting security
• Absence of unified maturity definitions for internet voting protocols
• Socio-technical requirements not structurally considered in system comparisons

Innovation

• Trust-centric maturity scoring framework
• Comprehensive trust model analysis
• Extendable univariate toolkit normalization