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Scytl is a European company specialized in Secure Electronic Voting for the public and private sectors. Our main objective is to enable Secure eVoting and eDemocracy environments to the voters. For this reason our web is designed considering the most advanced Usability, Standardization, Compatibility and Accessibility requirements.



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About Scytl's name

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Management Team

Pere Valles, Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Valles joined Scytl in March 2004 after spending most of his professional career in the United States. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Valles was Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer of GlobalNet, a NASDAQ publicly-traded telecommunications company headquartered in Chicago. Mr. Valles assisted GlobalNet in becoming one of the leading providers of Voice-over-IP in the world and was instrumental in the successful sale of the company to The Titan Corporation, a NYSE defense company. At GlobalNet, Mr. Valles was responsible for designing and executing the strategic plan that led to an increase in revenues from US$ 25 million to over US$ 100 million andbrought the company to profitability. Previously, Mr. Valles had worked as Senior Manager for KPMG’s Mergers & Acquisitions group in Los Angeles and Miami providing financial and strategic consulting services to private equity groups and corporations involved in acquisitions in the United States, Latin America and Europe. During his career at KPMG, Mr. Valles actively participated in more than 20 transactions in the telecommunications and technology areas. Mr. Valles has a bachelor degree in Economics and a bachelor degree in Law from the University of Barcelona and an MBA.

Pablo Sarrias , VP Sales & Marketing
Mr. Sarrias joined Scytl as Director of Worldwide Sales and Marketing in May 2006, after having spent most of his professional career in Germany. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Sarrias was Business Manager at Hewlett-Packard, having responsibility over the OpenView Telecommunications family of software products in Europe, Middle East and Africa. At Hewlett-Packard, Mr. Sarrias was responsible for designing and executing an international go-to-market plan that led to a sustained increase in revenues of over 30% year over year, being the largest growth ever experienced by this product line. Previously, Mr. Sarrias worked as Senior Solution Architect at Hewlett-Packard and DaimlerChrisler Information Services, and as Senior Network Project Planner at Amadeus Data Processing, the leading travel reservation provider. Mr. Sarrias has a Masters degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Onno Van Dommelen, VP Technology
Mr. van Dommelen joined Scytl as Technology Director in February 2004. Mr. van Dommelen is a Dutch national with over 15 years of experience in different senior IT positions for multinational corporations and governments in the United States, Europe and Central America. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. van Dommelen was the IT Director of the Robotics Division of Mecalux, one of the world's leading companies in the warehousing system market, where he managed a team of 30 IT professionals. Mr. van Dommelen has a proven record of successfully delivering projects within budget and on time for organizations such as Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Army, Hoogovens Corus and AMC University. Mr. van Dommelen is an expert in software project management and has extensive knowledge of software development life-cycle methods, software engineering methodologies and processes, software architecture, and programming languages. Mr. van Dommelen has undergraduate studies in Software Engineering from the Dutch Open University and numerous post-graduate courses on quality assurance and software development processes.

Jordi Puiggali, VP Research and Development
Mr. Puiggali joined Scytl as Research & Development Director in September 2001 and has been instrumental in the development of Scytl’s technology and intellectual property. Mr. Puiggali has co-authored numerous international patents on application-level cryptography and e-voting security. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Puiggali was the Technical Director for PKI and security projects at the IT department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Mr. Puiggali has also actively collaborated with the cryptographic research group of the Department of Computer Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona where he co-directed research projects on PKI applied cryptography .Mr. Puiggali is a security expert and has participated as a speaker and lecturer in numerous international conferences on computer security and applied cryptography. Mr. Puiggali has a bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Ramón Barriga, VP Finance
Mr. Barriga joined Scytl as Finance & Administration Director in March 2004. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Barriga was a consultant on corporate governance issues for institutional investors and publicly-traded companies at Soler Padró Morrow, a prestigious law firm. Previously, Mr. Barriga was Director of Finance and Administration at Asein Ingenieros SL and was actively involved in the international expansion of this Spanish corporation. Mr. Barriga has also held numerous accounting and financial positions in the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Pharma (now Novartis). Mr. Barriga is a lecturer and professor of financial analysis at the Catalan Institute of Technology. Mr. Barriga is a European Certified Financial Analyst (CEFA) and has a bachelor degree in Business Administration from the University of Barcelona and a Master in Finance from the Institut d’Estudis Financers (IEF).

Francesc Arbiol , Director of Sales EMEA
Mr. Arbiol joined Scytl as Director of Sales for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) in January 2006, bringing with him over 15 years of sales and marketing experience in various companies, primarily in the technology field. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Arbiol was based in Ireland working as Sales Manager for Southern Europe for Salesforce.com, the leading U.S. CRM software provider. At Salesforce.com, Mr. Arbiol was responsible for managing a team of account executives and achieving the company’s sales and marketing objectives in his region. Previously, Mr. Arbiol worked as Key Account Manager for Iona, the Irish multinational IT corporation specialized in middleware solutions. At Iona, Mr. Arbiol placed first in sales among 200 key account executives worldwide and was named Sales Person of the Year. Prior to Iona, Mr. Arbiol has held several sales positions with IT companies such as Universal Communications Platforms, a Swiss multinational corporation specializing in wireless solutions, and SoftForYou, a Spanish company specializing in ERP software and e-commerce solutions. Mr. Arbiol has undergraduate studies in Psychology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and post-graduate studies in Marketing from EADA.

Guillermo von der Walde, Director of Sales Americas
Mr. von der Walde joined Scytl in April 2005 and is currently the Director of Sales for the Americas region (Latin America and Canada). Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. von der Walde was Director of Channel Sales for Tango/04 Computing Group, a Spanish IT corporation specializing in systems management software. At Tango/04, Mr. von der Walde was responsible for defining the company’s partner strategy and developing relationships with partners and distributors. Previously, Mr. von der Walde worked as a senior consultant for Auna, one of the largest telecom operations in Spain, in a public telephony project. Mr. von der Walde has also held different sales positions with IBM Argentina where he received the “HPC” award for exceeding his sales quota for two consecutive years. Mr. von der Walde has a degree in Business Administration from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires and a Management Certificate from the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

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Interactive Demo

Client-Server Architecture on the Internet
In any client-server environment using the internet, there are certain key elements.

• The user, who interacts with the client device, which is usually a computer, but can be a mobile phone or a PDA.
• The internet, an insecure network that links the client device to the server. .
• Note however that we cannot have the internet without the ever-present hacker lurking in the background.
• The server, which can be one or more computers working together to process the data sent by the client device.
• Servers, being complex systems, typically have System Administrators whose job it is to take care of the servers.

Electronic Voting with Conventional Security
An electronic voting system is typically more complex than a standard client-server system.
On the server side, there will typically be two separate systems.

• The Vote Collection Server where the votes are collected from the internet.. En la demo, este servidor se asocia a la imagen de una urna.
• The Vote Tallying Server that receives the votes from the Vote Collection Server and tallies them. En la demo, este servidor se asocia a la imagen de una calculadora.

Of course, an electoral authority is present to oversee the entire process.
The voting process starts when the voter accesses the web page for the election.
The voter logs on with the appropriate credentials (user name and password or PKI or biometrics). The Vote Collection Server sends a personalized virtual ballot to the voter.
The voter makes his choices and sends the completed unsealed vote to the server through the internet in an encrypted SSL connection. The vote emerges unsealed from the SSL connection and is stored in the Vote Collection Server.
The Vote Collection Server continues collecting votes until the close of the election, at which point the votes are transferred to the Tallying Server, that publishes the totals for each candidate.
This can prove to be unsatisfactory to a voter who is concerned that his vote was not included in the final tally, as there is nothing to link his actions on his client device with the final result, except perhaps blind faith.
Other problems result from the fact that the votes are stored without adequate protection on the servers.
Anyone with privileged access to the servers can either see what the votes are and/or change them without being detected.
Any hacker who breaks through the firewall could do the same.

Electronic Voting Secured by Pnyx
The use of Pnyx technology in the previous e-voting scenario would solve these problems.
The philosophy behind Pnyx is to replicate the proven security processes that operate in conventional election systems.
To do this Pnyx adds three modules to a conventional electronic voting platform.

• The first Pnyx module is a Mixing Service that ensures that all votes that enter the Vote Collection Server are randomly shuffled. This operation, along with the use of digital envelopes, will ensure the anonymity of the votes. The Mixing Service also performs the important task of creating the unique cryptographic key pair that is used to protect individual ballots. The Mixing Service allows Pnyx to replicate in an electronic voting platform the conventional election practise of distributing trust among members of an electoral board. An electoral board is formed by various parties representing different interests in the election. Only the electoral board operating collectively is authorized to open the voting urn. With Pnyx a qualified majority of the electoral board must present their keys to unlock the votes at the end of the voting period.
• The second Pnyx module is the Voting Service that is added to the Vote Collection server to handle the voting protocol with the Voting Client.
• Once the voter accesses the election web page the third Pnyx module, the Voting Client, is downloaded to the voter’s browser. The Voting Client asks the voter for his voting credentials, which can be a local digital certificate (generally stored in a smartcard) or a remote digital certificate downloaded from the Voting Service using the voter’s personal identification code and password. Independently of the identification mechanism, the Voting Client always uses the voter’s private key to establish a strong authentication protocol that allows the Vote Collection Server to send the personalized virtual ballot to the client device. The voter makes his choices which are passed to the Voting Client and the Voting Client generates the contents for a voting receipt. The completed vote and the contents of the voting receipt are sealed in a digital envelope. The voting client prepares the voting receipt for its validation by the Voting Service. The voting receipt validation request and the digital envelope are sent securely through the Internet. When the Voting Service confirms reception of the digital envelope, it validates the voting receipt. The Voting Client receives the voting receipt and passes it to the voter. This voting receipt will allow the voter after the election to verify the existence of his vote in the final tally but will not allow vote selling since it does not reveal who the vote was for.

While stored in the Vote Collection server, the votes are securely stored in their digital envelopes that only the Electoral Board can open. This process repeats with all of the voters until the end of the polling period.

At this point, the Electoral Board gathers together and collectively starts the opening of the ballot box. The Mixing Server randomly shuffles the digital envelopes, opens them and breaks the relation between the votes, the voting receipts and the voters, thereby solving the conundrum of strongly authenticating voters while allowing voter privacy.

The digital urn is opened, revealing the votes and the voting receipts within but leaving no possibility of correlation between them. The votes and the voting receipt contents are sent to the tallying application, so that the results can be tallied and published along with the voting receipts.

With the voting receipts Pnyx solves one of the biggest problems with electronic voting systems, that of confidence in the system. All voters can now follow their own vote through to the final count and be sure that the system worked correctly and honestly.

The voters can see for themselves the existence of their voting receipt in the list published after the election. Should the receipt appear in the list, they know that their vote was included in the final tally. Should the receipt not appear in the list, then the voter can present their validated voting receipt to publicly complain about the result. Pnyx also solves the problem of certain people, such as system administrators or electoral authorities abusing their privileges. Reviewing or changing votes in the urn is rendered impossible by locking the votes in digital envelopes and securely logging all voting actions.

Intruders such as malicious hackers that managed to break through the firewall would likewise be prevented from doing any damage.

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