Achieving Learning Objectives through E-Voting Case Studies

The rapidly increasing use of electronic voting machines in US elections provides a wonderful opportunity to teach students about computer security. In this article, we present an informal e-voting case study to achieve five learning outcomes for students in a typical college (or even high school) classroom. Our intent is to motivate a set of lessons specifically involving e-voting, as well as illustrate the usefulness of mapping outcomes to simplified case studies: (i) understanding how to write a "security specification", (ii) learning about different forms of security policies, (iii) understanding confidentiality, privacy, and information flow, (iv) recognizing the importance of considering usability from a security perspective, and (v) identifying assurances role in establishing confidence in results