A Systematic Mapping Study on Security Requirements, Vulnerabilities, and Technological Architectures in E-Voting

Abstract

[Context and motivation]. E-voting systems have the potential to improve the voting process by making it more efficient and increase voter turnout, however, they still face obstacles to adoption in relation to security and trust. [Problem]. Despite security and trust being primary barriers to e-voting adoption, existing studies tend to focus on specific technologies or use predefined security properties, leaving the relationships between technological architectures, security requirements, and vulnerabilities largely unmapped across the last decade of research. [Method]. We conduct a systematic mapping study over e-voting literature from 2015 to 2025 focusing on technological architecture, security requirements, and vulnerabilities discussed in papers, as well as the paper types. [Results]. We find that online systems are frequently discussed, including Helios and Blockchain technologies. The most frequently discussed requirements, like Privacy and integrity, are consistently discussed across all 10 years indicating a consensus that these requirements are crucial for e-voting systems. Attacks discussed are usually coercion and denial of service attacks, which corresponds to attacks described as obstacles to e-voting in practice. We find the field mostly consists of proposals and implementation of systems rather than evaluations, indicating a gap in empirical validation of proposed systems. [Contribution]. This study provides an overview of e-voting literature, showcasing developments in technological architectures, security requirements and vulnerabilities discussed in the literature, as well as relations between the 3 dimensions. We further derive functional and non-functional requirement specifications from the identified security requirements, supporting the elicitation and specification of security requirements for future e-voting systems.