After the voting debacle in the Florida Presidential election of 2000 with its now-fabled hanging chads and pregnant chads, many voting jurisdictions turned to electronic voting machines. This transition has had at least as many problems as punch-card systems and added the additional one of making recounts impossible. As a result, many jurisdictions have gone back to paper ballots in despair. We believe that electronic voting can have many benefits including accessibility and usability but requires regarding voting as a system of which the voting machine is only a (small) part. In this paper we describe all the components of an electronic voting system that is practical and difficult to tamper with. We emphasize the importance of systems aspects, defense in depth, and being paranoiac.

Many systems execute untrusted programs in virtual machines (VMs) to limit their access to system resources. Sun introduced the Java VM in 1995, primarily intended as a lightweight platform for execution of untrusted code inside Web pages. More recently, Microsoft developed the .NET platform with similar goals. Both platforms share many design and implementation properties, but there are key differences between Java and .NET that have an impact on their security. This paper examines how .NET's design avoids vulnerabilities and limitations discovered in Java and discusses lessons learned (and missed) from Java's experience with security.