RE-Vote09 First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for E-voting Systems 31st August, 2009 - Atlanta, Georgia, USA. (In Conjunction with RE'09 )

Overview

The workshop proposes to identify best-practice for the engineering of e-voting system requirements, and to improve the specification of e-voting system standards and accreditation (certification) processes. Particular attention will be paid to the analysis of voting requirements documents, including those that pre-date e-voting.

Main Issues

The workshop will address the following main issues:
• Empirical analysis concerning the impact of poorly specified requirements on current e-voting technology.
• The role of formal methods in specification and verification of system properties, with particular interest in security, verifiability and anonymity.
• Improving communication (co-ordination) processes between the main participants in the specification and use of e-voting system requirements: the standards bodies, the procurement offices, the manufacturers, the testing/accreditation authorities and the users (election administrators and voters).
• Requirements Maintenance, Domain Engineering & (Software) Product Lines.
• Analysis of voting requirements documents and requirements capture processes, including those that pre-date e-voting.
• What other domains can learn from the e-voting experience

Call for Submissions

Submissions are welcome on any subject that falls within the main issues.

Short/Position papers (3-5 pages)

We are particularly interested in papers concerning the role of requirements models in the process of e-voting system procurement, development, evaluation and deployment.

Full/Research papers (8-10 pages)

We are particularly interested in experience reports, empirical studies and reports on engineering advances.

Evaluation process

Submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for relevance to the workshop topics of interest

Publication of accepted papers

RE’09 workshop proceedings will be published online in the IEEE CS Digital Library. Please use the IEEE template as per the main RE-09 conference for your submission (formatted according to the 8.5x11 inch IEEE CS proceedings format). For downloading instructions and templates, go to the Author Forms web page of the IEEE Computer Society.

One author of an accepted paper is required to register for the RE-VOTE09 workshop, otherwise the paper will be withdrawn.

Submission Procedure

The submission procedure is now closed.

Programme

Session #1: From Past To Future	9.00am-10.30am
9-9.15	WELCOME - J Paul Gibson
9.15 - 10	Invited talk - "Early Requirements for Mechanical Voting Systems", Doug Jones.
10-10.30	"Specification of a Voting Service Provider", Axel Schmidt, Lucie Langer, Melanie Volkamer and Johannes Buchmann.
10.30am -11am Break
Session #2: Learning From Experience	11am - 12.30pm
11-11.30	"Experiences Gained from the first Pret a Voter Implementation", David Bismark, James Heather, Roger Peel, Peter Ryan, Steve Schneider and Zhe Xia.
11.30-12	"Managing Requirements for e-voting Systems: Issues and Approaches Motivated by a Case Study", Komminist Weldemariam, Andrea Mattioli and Adolfo Villafiorita.
12 - 12.30	"Electronic Elections: Trust Through Engineering", Carsten Schuermann.
12.30pm - 2pm Lunch Break
Session #3: Risk, Security and Resilience	2pm - 3.30pm
2 - 2.30	"Determine the Resilience of Evaluated Internet Voting Systems", Melanie Volkamer and Rüdiger Grimm.
2.30 - 3	"A Risk Assessment Model for Voting Systems using Threat Trees and Monte Carlo Simulation", Harold Pardue, Jeff Landry and Alec Yasinsac.
3 - 3.30	"Towards a Framework on the Security Requirements for Electronic Voting Protocols", Lucie Langer, Axel Schmidt, Alexander Stolfik, Melanie Volkamer and Johannes Buchmann.
3.30pm - 4pm Break
Session #4: Election Administration	4pm - 5.30pm
4-4.30	"Improving Voting System Event Logs", Andrea Mascher, Paul Cotton and Douglas Jones.
4.30-5.30	Panel Discussion - chaired by John Wack - on "Developing/improving voting system requirements specifications and standards"

Registration

Register now at www.re09.org. The RE-VOTE09 workshop can be booked independently from the main conference.

If you want to participate in the workshop only, select "W4 RE-VOTE09"

Workshop Fees (from www.re09.org):

Workshop - Full Day	On/Before 20 July	After 20 July
IEEE Member	US$275	US$350
Non Member	US$325	US$400
IEEE Student Member	US$175	US$250
Student Non Member	US$200	US$275

Target Audience

The workshop is targetted at a wide range of participants: academic researchers, e-voting machine manufacturers, government departments (users), standards bodies and testing/verification authorities.

A goal of the workshop is to generalise results from e-voting to wider domains such as secure systems and electronic government.

Important Dates

• Deadline for Submissions:
  4 July 2009
  10 July 2009 (updated)
• Author Notification:
  17 July 2009
  21/22 July 2009 (updated)
• Early Registration:
  20 July 2009
  27 July 2009 (updated)
• Camera-ready Due: 3 August 2009
• Workshop Date: 31st August 2009

Programme Committee

• David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, USA.
• J Paul Gibson (Co-chair): Maitre de conferences in Le departement LOgiciels-Reseaux (LOR), Telecom & Management SudParis, France
• James Heather is a lecturer at the University of Surrey (Department of Computing, Formal Methods and Security Research Group), UK
• Xiaoping Jia Professor Director, Institute for Software Engineering School of Computer Science, Telecommunication, and Information Systems, DePaul University, USA
• Douglas W. Jones (Co-chair): computer scientist at the University of Iowa, USA
• Joe Kiniry is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at University College Dublin, Ireland
• Nancy R. Mead is a senior member of the technical staff in the Networked Systems Survivability Program at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), USA
• Jean-Luc Raffy is a director of studies at T&MSP, Evry; and an experienced election administrator (France).
• Mark Ryan is a Reader in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.
• Melanie Volkamer is a researcher in the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), Technical University Darmstadt, Germany
• Poorvi Vora is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, USA.
• John P. Wack is a computer scientist and researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where his most recent work is in managing the voting team responsible for developing the next version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines.
• Justin Zhan is a faculty member at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

Workshop Co-Chairs

J Paul Gibson (Homepage)

Paul Gibson is currently a Maitre de conferences in Le departement LOgiciels-Reseaux (LOR), Telecom & Management SudParis, France

He has been interested in e-voting since 2004, when he worked for the Commission for Electronic Voting (CEV) in Ireland on the evaluation of their e-voting systems. (He was asked to examine software quality and software process.)

He has supervised, amongst others, a PhD student - Margaret McGaley - who successfully completed her thesis "Evoting: an immature technology in a critical context" in 2008. This work looked at the problems of poorly engineered requirements and standards.

Paul has also worked (whilst on sabbatical leave with the CNRS in France) on formal software engineering of e-voting systems. Currently, he is working on the French ANR research project Sécurité et Audit du Vote Electronic (SAVE): modelling and simulating different distributed e-voting architectures in order to examine quality of service issues.

Douglas W. Jones (Homepage)

Douglas W. Jones is a computer scientist at the University of Iowa. His research focuses primarily on computer security, particularly electronic voting.

His involvement with electronic voting research began in 1994, when he was appointed to the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems. He chaired the board from 1999 to 2003, and has testified before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the United States House Committee on Science and the Federal Election Commission on voting issues.

Between 2005 and 2007, he served as an observer of the use of electronic voting in two elections in Kazakhstan and one in the Netherlands, and he has been a participant in work at the Carter Center and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to develop a methodology for observing elections in which electronic voting plays a role.

He is currently a member of the ACCURATE electronic voting project(A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections)