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In modern times, it is necessary to offer reliable products to match the statutory directives concerning product liability and the high expectations of customers for durable devices. Furthermore, to maintain a high competitiveness, engineers need to know as accurately as possible how long their product will last and how to influence the life expectancy without expensive and time-consuming testing. As the components of a system are responsible for the system reliability, this paper introduces and evaluates calculation methods for life expectancy of common machine elements in technical systems. Subsequently, a method for the quantitative evaluation of the reliability of technical systems is proposed and applied to a heavy-duty power shift transmission.

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Abstract. Helios is an end-to-end verifiable remote electronic voting system which has been used for elections in academic contexts. It allows voters to verify that their vote was cast, and included in the final tally, as intended. User studies have shown that voters are unlikely to perform this verification, probably due to the effortful and cumbersome manual steps that are required by the system. To address this challenge, we propose, in this paper, two improvements: the first is to ameliorate the cumbersome nature of the verification process as much as possible. We offer two suggestions for doing this. To accommodate voters who have no interest in verifying, we propose a further improvement: delegation. This will allow voters to nominate a trusted third party to perform the verification on their behalf as and when they cast their vote. Hence no extra effort is required, and we can exploit existing trust in public institutions to provide voters with the assurance that the voting process is indeed honest and above board. In addition to providing end-to-end verifiability in a less effortful manner, we provide stored as cast and tallied as stored verifiability as well, for voters who do not wish to verify their own votes.

In the past, researchers have proposed many voting schemes that satisfy a wide range of security properties. These schemes often rely on strong trust assumptions and do not consider the voter sufficiently, which currently renders them inappropriate for usage in real-world elections. In this paper we focus on the voting scheme Civitas, which features provably strong security properties, such as end-toend verifiability and coercion-resistance. We identify the strong trust assumptions and usability weaknesses of the scheme, which currently prevent its usage in real-world elections. Based on these results, we show how most of these strong trust assumptions can be implemented, e.g., by using eID cards in order to overcome Civitas' most critical usability problem, namely credential handling. Together with a voter-process description and a user-interface, we pave the way for the use of Civitas in real-world elections.

A widely discussed issue in Internet voting is the secure platform problem: ensuring vote secrecy and/or vote integrity in the presence of compromised voting devices. A well-known approach to address this issue is code voting. Code voting systems differ regarding their security level: some ensure either vote secrecy or vote integrity, while others ensure both. However, these systems potentially impair usability, as voters have to enter and/or compare random codes, rather than just selecting their preferred candidate. This might negatively affect voters' attitude towards the adoption of Internet voting. Therefore, it is important to determine to which extent voters would sacrifice usability for security. To determine this tradeoff between usability and security, we conducted a pilot user study among university students in the university elections setting, and a quantitative analysis. Our findings reveal that voters would sacrifice approximately 26 points (scale 0-100) of usability given a system with higher security.

One common way to ensure the security in voting schemes, is to distribute critical tasks between different entities-the so called trustees. While in most election settings, election authorities perform the task of trustees, elections in small groups such as board elections can be implemented in a way that all voters are also trustees. This is actually the ideal case for an election as trust is fully distributed. A number of voting schemes have been proposed for such elections. Our focus is on a mix net based approach to maximize flexibility regarding ballot design. We proposed and implemented a corresponding voting scheme as Android smartphone application as we believe smartphones are most likely to be used in the considered election settings. Our implementation also enables voters to remotely participate in the voting process. The implementation enables us to measure timings for the tallying phase for different settings in order to analyze whether the chosen mix net based scheme is acceptable for the considered election settings.

Abstract-Internet voting continues to raise interest. A large number of Internet voting schemes are available, both in use, as well as in research literature. While these schemes are all based on different security models, most of these models are not adequate for high-stake elections. Furthermore, it is not known how to evaluate the understandability of these schemes (although this is important to enable voters' trust in the election result). Therefore, we propose and justify an adequate security model and criteria to evaluate understandability. We also describe an Internet voting scheme, Pretty Understandable Democracy, show that it satisfies the adequate security model and that it is more understandable than Pretty Good Democracy, currently the only scheme that also satisfies the proposed security model.