A high level security mechanism for Internet polls

Nowadays Internet Polls are becoming more and more important as they are being used on a large scale. Being a web application a poll can suffer from a variety of attack. Recently automated web tools are used to attack Internet Polls in order to alter the results via automatic voting. Several protection methods introduced to stop automatic voting including IP Locking, cookie-based, and Human Interaction Proof. In this article, existing methods for protection are examined and also we have proposed an innovative solution, which considerably increases the security of Internet polls and the reliability of their results. The proposed solution has two phases: the construction phase in which the poll content and CAPTCHA test are created and the utilization phase, in which vote counting operation is done. The CAPTCHA that is used in the proposed method is an image-based CAPTCHA. For the aim of voting, an Internet user has to drag his or her desired poll option expressed in form of movable text object and drop it on to the picture of an object indicated by the CAPTCHA. The proposed method is fair, robust, and resistant. One of the main advantages of the method is that it can be used by all ages.