UCORV - Designing usable coercion resistant Internet voting systems

One of the prominent challenges in Internet voting is voter coercion: if the voters cast their votes from an unprotected environment, the coercer can observe the voter during voting and ensure that the voter obeys the coercer's instructions. Existing cryptographic protocols protect against this kind of coercion. However, they rely on additional steps on behalf of the voter that are known to be too
complicated and therefore hardly usable. In the UCORV project, I apply methods from the humancentered security and privacy field to design voting systems that are both usable and coercionresistant.
This is done by (a) involving the user at different stages of designing such systems via empirical studies, and (b) integrating the insights from related research in human factors in securitycritical systems, such as usable authentication. The results of the project have the potential to revolutionize secure elections, as well as empower users in other contexts where coercion poses a threat.