COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & SCIENCE

Voting is essential to American democracy. For proper functionality, it is imperative that as many eligible citizens as possible register and participate in our country’s elections and that every vote is counted without bias. These fundamental requirements should be considered when making design decisions for a voting system. For this project, our team has worked to create a voting system that satisfies these fundamental requirements with enhanced security and reliability without compromising the user experience. The goal is to achieve a more trustworthy voting system that has a positive effect on voter participation.

To achieve our project goals, our team considered various design alternatives. The main departure of our voting system from the current system is our inclusion of a blockchain network for verifying and storing votes. The blockchain network provides an extra layer of security for vote integrity by requiring a distributed consensus for each vote and making the storage of votes immutable. Thus, an attacker would have to compromise over half of the nodes on the network to take control of the system. The blockchain network also does not require trust to be placed on one party, improving trust in vote integrity, fairness, and accuracy.imperative that as many eligible citizens as possible register and participate in our country’s elections and that every vote is counted without bias. These fundamental requirements should be considered when making design decisions for a voting system. For this project, our team has worked to create a voting system that satisfies these fundamental requirements with enhanced security and reliability without compromising the user experience. The goal is to achieve a more trustworthy voting system that has a positive effect on voter participation.

As computer networks continue to evolve and expand their reach into our lives, so too have the threats of intrusion, infection, and data breaches. The prevalence of malware continues to put livelihoods and even personal identities at risk, and ransomware costs millions in damage each year. Now more than ever, the importance of security on all levels should be emphasized, especially the network layer. ProtoNet is a tool that aims to make network design more secure on a foundation level by generating secure network layouts. ProtoNet offers an informative and user-friendly solution for building a network. While the program highlights the benefits of a secure network foundation and offers guidance in this area, the network configurations are fully customizable, allowing the user to edit generated layouts and enter what network resources they want included. As a tool that facilitates this process, ProtoNet helps to encourage secure network practices and protects the user’s data.