DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FINGERPRINT-BASED PLATFORM FOR SECURING ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM

Abstract

An election is a formal procedure through which a group of individuals decides on an individual or multiple individuals to be in a position of authority. The mechanical and paper-based methods have been identified and used in history to conduct an election. In over two decades, the integration of electronic devices either wholly or partially into the electoral processes for decision-making was achieved having identified irregularities such as impersonation, false alteration and snatching of ballot boxes in earlier methods of voting. Despite the measures to secure the voting systems from fraudulent activities among corrupt politicians and election officers, attackers have been compromising the security measures thereby, providing illegitimate opportunities for unwanted contestants to win elections. A fingerprint-based platform for securing an electronic voting system was proposed for credible elections. The specific objectives were to design a fingerprint and visual semagram technique for securing an e-voting system, implement the designed e-voting system and evaluate the performance of the proposed e-voting model. The e-voting model consisted of six modules, namely enrolment, authentication, voting, results, semagramming, and desemagramming. The architectural design was implemented using Java in Android Studio and C-Sharp in Microsoft Visual Studio. In the enrolment module, two fingerprints from both the right and left hands of randomly sampled 131 genuine students of the Department of Computer Science were acquired. The fingerprints of the election officers were acquired and fused as the shared key to sign and verify the results and for results’ authentication. The fingerprints of 80 imposters were not processed but were used for experimentation with false identification. The fingerprints’ score was fused with the voter’s random identification number using the proposed fusion technique to produce a voter’s ticket for authentication and voting. In the authentication and voting modules, a voter was granted access to the approved digital ballot to elect a preferred contestant when the voter’s ticket matched a template in the database. The votes of each contestant were stored in the polling database for onward transmission to the collation centre. In the results and semagramming modules, the results were encrypted, transformed into the sensitive image and concealed in the image of a carrier to generate the “Vimago” required at the collation centre. At the desemagramming module, the collation officer uncovered, decrypted and verified the received results using the shared key. The performance of the system was evaluated using standard metrics and further evaluated using goal-question metrics to establish the usability and satisfaction level. The proposed e-voting model had had an accuracy of 99.93%, sensitivity of 99.92% and specificity of 99.94%. A fusion technique for enrolment and authentication in a secure e-voting system and a secure transmission of election results against detection in a public network were established as the contribution to knowledge. Based on these results, the proposed e-voting model was recommended for use by various institutions like the Students Union Government, the Independent National Electoral Commission of Nigeria and the State Security Service among others.