Thursday, 18 February 2010

An application to enable secure electronic voting from a web browser has won the Detica Security Prize for the best security-related thesis in the Computer Science Department of the University of Bristol.

Winner of the prize Emili Evripidou used Javascript to implement a number of the homomorphic encryption schemes via a web browser. With Javascript the voter can verify the code and does not need to download an application.

Nick Spenceley, Head of Detica Forensics, said: “Yet again, the Detica Security prize is highlighting a top class cryptography project at the University of Bristol and the significance of encryption in society today. Emili Evripidou’s project is both intellectually outstanding and of great practical significance as we move towards electronic voting.”

Professor Nigel Smart of the Department of Computer Science at Bristol said: “To be recognised by a global leader in information intelligence, is a great incentive for our postgraduate students. Competition is keen and Emili Evripidou’s dissertation was particularly impressive. I especially liked the way her application turned out to be a good practical test of the runtimes of different browsers in handling the necessarily large amounts of data.”