Specification of the Control Logic of an eVoting System in UML: the ProVotE experience

The ProVotE project aims at actuating art. 84 of law 2 - 5/3/2003 of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy), which promotes the introduction of e-voting systems for the next provincial elections. The goals of the project are building an e-voting system and defining the related process and certification issues in order to deliver a solution which is compliant with the italian electoral law, that is trusted and usable by the voters, and that implements the security and dependability requirements of the best international practices and experiences. This paper presents some of the issues and challenges we faced during the development of the e-voting prototype which was tested by about 8500 voters in three different trials held during the elections for the local representatives. In particular we show how we integrated UML in the development process of the e-voting machine. We also highlight how we extended existing tools to support the formal verification of the UML specifications and how we automated the generation of a critical component of the e-voting machine using UML statecharts