Certificate for Online Elections Software

The certificate for online elections was first awarded by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in 2016. Polyas CORE 2.2.3. is the first online voting software, which has obtained this certificate through the BSI according to Common Criteria Standards.

The reason for the certification is the security profile BSI-DSZ-CC-0862-2016, which formulates the system requirements for online elections. The online voting software from Polyas was evaluated in regards to its functionality and reliability by the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

The Basic Security Requirements for Online Elections Products (PDF) are governed by universal voting principles (free, equal, secret, universal and direct). Thus, online elections configured by Polyas CORE 2.2.3. are safe according to BSI requirements and meet the standards of a democratic voting right.
The following features belong to Polyas (version 2.2.3):
• The identity of the voter cannot be tracked down from their cast vote.
• Voters cannot share their decision with third parties.
• The electorate has to be clearly and reliably identified and authenticated, so
that only registered persons from the electoral roll may vote
• Voter can vast their vote only once.
• Votes cannot be changed, deleted or added during their transfer in the
network.
• Votes in the ballot box cannot be additionally changed, deleted or added
• Interim inputs are not counted.

With the awarding of the certificate Polyas CORE Software obtained the security certificate BSI-DSZ-CC-0862-2016.

The evaluation was documented in the certification report which contains full features such as the overall system architecture.
Polyas election system has found to meet the following requirements in the certification report:

• The online elections system functions by means of partial systems for relevant security events always found in separate log files. The elections administrator can view these protocol data in a comprehensible and readable form.
• Data integrity mistakes trigger security warnings, which are recorded and sent to the elections committee per email.
• The electoral roll (number of voters), where the identity of the voter is known and the ballot box containing the votes, are separate entities.
• The communication between voters and the ballot box is encoded, so that only eligible voters can gain access. The votes are also locked and stored together with a random value
• In the counting and archiving of the election, an archive checksum is generated and used as protection against manipulation

Polyas has developed software for legally binding online elections. Customers can set up and run elections over the Internet themselves.

Polyas GmbH
Alte Jakobstraße 88
10179 Berlin
Germany

Laila Oudray
Head of PR
l.oudray@polyas.de
Tel.: +49 30 8806 010-14

This release was published on openPR.