Re: [belenios-discuss] Self-hosted instance in a no-internet environment

[Alek Ohanian <alek.hayorti AT gmail.com>]

I think the critical point of information I forgot to mention earlier is that the voters and people overseeing the vote will be in the same room for the duration of the election, so primary communication will in-person. 

We'd like to create the voters' anonymous credentials ahead of time, but the means of distributing those credentials hasn't been decided yet.

Each individual will have their own device to submit their votes at the same time.

On Tue., Feb. 15, 2022, 6:02 a.m. Stéphane Glondu, <stephane.glondu AT inria.fr> wrote:

Hello,

Le 15/02/2022 à 09:59, Alek Ohanian a écrit :
> I was looking into Belenios and spent quite a bit of time getting it
> deployed, but then I realized that it doesn't appear like I can avoid
> the application's dependency on email. I thought removing email
> authentication and email settings from the config would let me use a
> standard username and password, which was true until the application
> asked me to add an email address to my user account.
>
> What I'm really interested in trying to do is to test the deployment of
> a voting system like Belenios in a completely enclosed environment
> that's completely cut off from the internet. The server and all of the
> clients would be connected via a local network and since none of them
> will be connected to the internet, none of them will have access to email.
>
> Is this something I could accomplish with Belenios?

How do you communicate with voters inside this restricted network?

Actually, the dependency on email is not that hard, just convenient. But
in theory, a private communication channel from election authorities to
voters is needed to bootstrap things.

Note that you don't need Internet access in order to have working
emails. Your email system can be restricted to an intranet.

Belenios sends emails with the "sendmail" command, which can be
overridden with the BELENIOS_SENDMAIL environment variable. Depending on
how you wish to communicate with voters, you can set this variable to a
suitable script.

On first login, the system does ask for an email address if it cannot
determine one by itself, but it is only used (at the moment) to pre-fill
the "Contact" field of elections, which is purely informative.

Note that if you choose the "secure" mode for credentials, they will not
be sent by the server itself (but someone will still have to send them
somehow). If, in addition, you choose an authentication scheme that does
not involve emails (such as CAS or OpenID Connect), the only emails that
Belenios will send are the confirmation emails (after a vote).


Cheers,

--
Stéphane

Belenios is free software. You can support us with a donation:
https://www.belenios.org/donations.html