20. Protecting the Integrity of Elections Using Biometrics

From the past to today, the growth of information technology in the world is huge, and its resolutions are becoming significant in almost all arenas of life. The e-government system is one of the great resolutions of information technology. The implementation of election process by electronic voting (e-voting) becomes more useful with the rapid growth of e-government evolution. An e-voting system provides facility by which the voters can submit their votes over the computer network via the Internet. Thus, the voters can join in elections without going physically to the polling places, which is more efficient and economical. The recent growth in communications and cryptographic techniques facilitates the implementation of e-voting. However, a practical and accurate e-voting scheme is highly required, which can ensure the e-voting requirements in terms of uniqueness, fairness, privacy, uncoercibility, eligibility, accuracy, individual verifiability, robustness, and universal verifiability (Obaidat MS, Boudriga N (2007) Security of e-systems and computer networks. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York). However, incorporating biometric features like hand geometry, fingerprint, iris, retina, and handwriting can basically make digital photo ID card for each voter. During the election process, voters can submit their votes by punching their photo ID card into their electronic device like mobile, laptop, and computer (terminal) from remote places. In this chapter, we first describe the requirement of e-voting system and their security issues. Then we discuss some biometric-based e-voting schemes along with all possible attacks which need to be protected during the design of biometric-based e-voting system.