Implementation of a Secure Internet Voting Protocol

Voting is one of the most important activities in a democratic society. In a traditional voting environment voting process sometimes becomes quite inconvenient due to the reluctance of certain voters to visit a polling booth to cast votes besides involving huge social and human resources. The development of computer networks and elaboration of cryptographic techniques facilitate the implementation of electronic voting. In this work we propose a secure electronic voting protocol that is suitable for large scale voting over the Internet. The protocol allows a voter to cast his or her ballot anonymously, by exchanging untraceable yet authentic messages. The e-voting protocol is based on blind signatures and has the properties of anonymity, mobility, efficiency, robustness, authentication, uniqueness, and universal verifiability and coercion-resistant. The proposed protocol encompasses three distinct phases - that of registration phase, voting phase and counting phase involving five parties, the voter, certification centre, authentication server, voting server and a tallying server

Nullification, a coercion-resistance add-on for e-voting protocols

Coercion is one of the remaining issues on internet voting. Many developing countries are prone to this problem due to lower income rate. In this study, a novel coercion-resistant protocol has been proposed that can be integrated with previously proposed e-voting systems. We call it nullification. We present it as a part of the VoteXX e-voting protocol that has been designed and implemented through this study. Nullification gives the voter a strategic advantage over the coercer. The voter can share her keys with a trusted proxy, called a nullifier, for later flipping that vote. Integrity and ballot secrecy are provided simultaneously through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, specifically Σ-protocols. We show how our approach is different from (and potentially composable with) re-voting or panic password techniques that have been previously proposed in the academic literature. Through designing this protocol, we solve several issues, design new Σ-protocols and protocols for the secure evaluation of basic logic functions like exclusive-or (xor) under encryption: True XOR and Online XOR have been proposed that improves the previously proposed Mix and Match protocol for secure multi-party computation of an arbitrary function under constrained input domain

Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

An Epistemic Approach to Coercion-Resistance for Electronic Voting Protocols

Coercion resistance is an important and one of the most intricate security requirements of electronic voting protocols. Several definitions of coercion resistance have been proposed in the literature, including definitions based on symbolic models. However, existing definitions in such models are rather restricted in their scope and quite complex. In this paper, we therefore propose a new definition of coercion resistance in a symbolic setting, based on an epistemic approach. Our definition is relatively simple and intuitive. It allows for a fine-grained formulation of coercion resistance and can be stated independently of a specific, symbolic protocol and adversary model. As a proof of concept, we apply our definition to three voting protocols. In particular, we carry out the first rigorous analysis of the recently proposed Civitas system. We precisely identify those conditions under which this system guarantees coercion resistance or fails to be coercion resistant. We also analyze protocols proposed by Lee et al. and Okamoto.Comment: An extended version of a paper from IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 200

HandiVote: simple, anonymous, and auditable electronic voting

We suggest a set of procedures utilising a range of technologies by which a major democratic deficit of modern society can be addressed. The mechanism, whilst it makes limited use of cryptographic techniques in the background, is based around objects and procedures with which voters are currently familiar. We believe that this holds considerable potential for the extension of democratic participation and control