2,082 research outputs found
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
Homomorphic Data Isolation for Hardware Trojan Protection
The interest in homomorphic encryption/decryption is increasing due to its
excellent security properties and operating facilities. It allows operating on
data without revealing its content. In this work, we suggest using homomorphism
for Hardware Trojan protection. We implement two partial homomorphic designs
based on ElGamal encryption/decryption scheme. The first design is a
multiplicative homomorphic, whereas the second one is an additive homomorphic.
We implement the proposed designs on a low-cost Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA. Area
utilization, delay, and power consumption are reported for both designs.
Furthermore, we introduce a dual-circuit design that combines the two earlier
designs using resource sharing in order to have minimum area cost. Experimental
results show that our dual-circuit design saves 35% of the logic resources
compared to a regular design without resource sharing. The saving in power
consumption is 20%, whereas the number of cycles needed remains almost the sam
What did I really vote for? On the usability of verifiable e-voting schemes
E-voting has been embraced by a number of countries, delivering benefits in terms of efficiency and accessibility. End-to-end verifiable e-voting schemes facilitate verification of the integrity of individual votes during the election process. In particular, methods for cast-as-intended verification enable voters to confirm that their cast votes have not been manipulated by the voting client. A well-known technique for effecting cast-as-intended verification is the Benaloh Challenge. The usability of this challenge is crucial because voters have to be actively engaged in the verification process. In this paper, we report on a usability evaluation of three different approaches of the Benaloh Challenge in the remote e-voting context. We performed a comparative user study with 95 participants. We conclude with a recommendation for which approaches should be provided to afford verification in real-world elections and suggest usability improvements
Making Code Voting Secure against Insider Threats using Unconditionally Secure MIX Schemes and Human PSMT Protocols
Code voting was introduced by Chaum as a solution for using a possibly
infected-by-malware device to cast a vote in an electronic voting application.
Chaum's work on code voting assumed voting codes are physically delivered to
voters using the mail system, implicitly requiring to trust the mail system.
This is not necessarily a valid assumption to make - especially if the mail
system cannot be trusted. When conspiring with the recipient of the cast
ballots, privacy is broken.
It is clear to the public that when it comes to privacy, computers and
"secure" communication over the Internet cannot fully be trusted. This
emphasizes the importance of using: (1) Unconditional security for secure
network communication. (2) Reduce reliance on untrusted computers.
In this paper we explore how to remove the mail system trust assumption in
code voting. We use PSMT protocols (SCN 2012) where with the help of visual
aids, humans can carry out addition correctly with a 99\% degree of
accuracy. We introduce an unconditionally secure MIX based on the combinatorics
of set systems.
Given that end users of our proposed voting scheme construction are humans we
\emph{cannot use} classical Secure Multi Party Computation protocols.
Our solutions are for both single and multi-seat elections achieving:
\begin{enumerate}[i)]
\item An anonymous and perfectly secure communication network secure against
a -bounded passive adversary used to deliver voting,
\item The end step of the protocol can be handled by a human to evade the
threat of malware. \end{enumerate} We do not focus on active adversaries
Energy efficient mining on a quantum-enabled blockchain using light
We outline a quantum-enabled blockchain architecture based on a consortium of
quantum servers. The network is hybridised, utilising digital systems for
sharing and processing classical information combined with a fibre--optic
infrastructure and quantum devices for transmitting and processing quantum
information. We deliver an energy efficient interactive mining protocol enacted
between clients and servers which uses quantum information encoded in light and
removes the need for trust in network infrastructure. Instead, clients on the
network need only trust the transparent network code, and that their devices
adhere to the rules of quantum physics. To demonstrate the energy efficiency of
the mining protocol, we elaborate upon the results of two previous experiments
(one performed over 1km of optical fibre) as applied to this work. Finally, we
address some key vulnerabilities, explore open questions, and observe
forward--compatibility with the quantum internet and quantum computing
technologies.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure
A Peered Bulletin Board for Robust Use in Verifiable Voting Systems
The Web Bulletin Board (WBB) is a key component of verifiable election
systems. It is used in the context of election verification to publish evidence
of voting and tallying that voters and officials can check, and where
challenges can be launched in the event of malfeasance. In practice, the
election authority has responsibility for implementing the web bulletin board
correctly and reliably, and will wish to ensure that it behaves correctly even
in the presence of failures and attacks. To ensure robustness, an
implementation will typically use a number of peers to be able to provide a
correct service even when some peers go down or behave dishonestly. In this
paper we propose a new protocol to implement such a Web Bulletin Board,
motivated by the needs of the vVote verifiable voting system. Using a
distributed algorithm increases the complexity of the protocol and requires
careful reasoning in order to establish correctness. Here we use the Event-B
modelling and refinement approach to establish correctness of the peered design
against an idealised specification of the bulletin board behaviour. In
particular we show that for n peers, a threshold of t > 2n/3 peers behaving
correctly is sufficient to ensure correct behaviour of the bulletin board
distributed design. The algorithm also behaves correctly even if honest or
dishonest peers temporarily drop out of the protocol and then return. The
verification approach also establishes that the protocols used within the
bulletin board do not interfere with each other. This is the first time a
peered web bulletin board suite of protocols has been formally verified.Comment: 49 page
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