Japan and South Korea will use the World Cup as an opportunity to show off their secure voting technology. The two countries will collect votes from soccer fans for the most valuable player (MVP) using an advanced secure Internet voting system, Divyan Konidala, a master's degree student at South Korea's Information and Communications University (ICU), confirmed on Monday.
Organized by ICU's International Research Center for Information Security (IRIS), a team of researchers will demonstrate the secure voting system on the Internet for the first time. Konidala will be a member of the demonstration team, he said.
As each vote is encrypted, a malicious third party is prevented from illegally tapping into, modifying or analyzing the vote, or identifying the voter, Konidala said.
"This is the first system developed that is secure enough," he said. The team hopes to promote the system as a de facto standard for use in democratic electric elections, he said.
A voter needs to register for ID and a password online at http://mvp.worldcup2002.or.kr. This generates the voter's encrypted public key and allows them to download a secure voting form. The voter can choose a best country, best player and best goalkeeper and then send the encrypted ballot, according to an IRIS statement.
Preliminary voting will be held between June 1 and June 10, with results to be released on June 15. The results of the main voting period, between June 16 and 25, will be released on June 30.
Four different languages -- Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese -- will be available for MVP voters, Konidala said.
Other participants in the project include six South Korean companies, including LG CNS, and Tokyo University and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. from Japan.