EIS 2022 : 1st International Workshop on Election Infrastructure Security

Fair and secure elections are the bedrock of democracy. In today’s world, voting and elections rely on a complex infrastructure comprising voter registration databases, several types of electronic devices (voting machines, optical scanners, etc.), protocols to securely transmit data from polling places to central processing facilities, various software applications to count, tabulate and analyze votes, and physical facilities to securely store ballots and voting equipment. People’s confidence in the result of elections is heavily dependent on a nation’s ability to secure such complex infrastructure and guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of the vote.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), a United States agency charged with securing the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, classifies election infrastructure as “critical infrastructure”. In fact, election infrastructure and processes are subject to attack by malicious actors just like any other critical infrastructure (e.g., energy systems, transportation systems, and financial systems). Recent events have shown how attacks against voting systems and election infrastructure, disinformation and misinformation campaigns, and claims of election fraud, whether founded or not, can affect people’s confidence in the integrity of the system and alienate voters. As threats evolve and become more sophisticated, the research community is called to find novel approaches and techniques to ensure the security of voting systems and election infrastructure and the confidentiality and integrity of the vote.

This workshop aims at providing researchers and practitioners in different areas of security (network security, cryptography, etc.), networking, hardware architectures, software engineering, system engineering, machine learning, and natural language processing with an interdisciplinary forum to present, discuss, and exchange ideas that address the challenges of current and next-generation Election Infrastructure systems. The workshop seeks submissions from academia, government, and industry presenting novel research results in all practical and theoretical aspects of Election Infrastructure Security.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Voter registration databases
- Voting machines
- Vote counting machines
- Electronic poll books
- Physical security of voting equipment
- Access control
- Security standards
- Disinformation & misinformation campaigns