E-vote and PKI’s : a Need, a Bliss or a Curse?

With the increasing popularity public key infrastructures have been acquiring in recent years and the legislative support for digital signatures, electronic voting protocols are moving from a strictly research area to the commercial arena. In this paper we examine the role public key infrastructures play in electronic voting in various protocols proposed in the literature, some of which are the kernel of experimental projects and/or commercial products. Although one of the rationales to move towards electronic voting systems is cost-effectiveness, in this paper we argue that performance issues should not be overlooked, especially in case of disaster recovery, were a CA to revoke all of its certificates during an election. Based on performance evaluation studies, we show that directory service access may become the system bottleneck.