Electronic Elections and Digital Money

Abstract

Electronic banking, commerce, and elections are examples of services that are already accessible or will be in the near future on the Internet. Without exaggeration, one can say that most services that require a face-to-face contact will be replaced by their network versions with remote interaction between a client and the parties involved in the service. A distributed system provides the medium for interaction. By its nature, the distributed system allows us to perform the requested services (banking, voting, etc.) by exchange of information only. Needless to say, all stages of service must be converted into protocols, each of which achieves a well-defined goal (such as client-server mutual identification, establishing a secure communication channel, verification of client request, etc.). Network services can be seen as a collection of elementary protocols executed by the parties in order to provide the well-defined service to the client(s).