Apollo - End-to-end Verifiable Internet Voting with Recovery from Vote Manipulation

We present security vulnerabilities in the remote voting system Helios. We propose Apollo, a modified version of Helios, which addresses these vulnerabilities and could improve the feasibility of internet voting. In particular, we note that Apollo does not possess Helios\u27 major known vulnerability, where a dishonest voting terminal can change the vote after it obtains the voter\u27s credential. With Apollo-lite, votes not authorized by the voter are detected by the public and prevented from being included in the tally. The full version of Apollo enables a voter to prove that her vote was changed. We also describe a very simple protocol for the voter to interact with any devices she employs to check on the voting system, to enable frequent and easy auditing of encryptions and checking of the bulletin board

Internet Voting Using Zcash

Voting systems have been around for hundreds of years and despite different views on their integrity, have always been deemed secure with some fundamental security and anonymity principles. Numerous electronic systems have been proposed and implemented but some suspicion has been raised regarding the integrity of elections due to detected security vulnerabilities within these systems. Electronic voting, to be successful, requires a more transparent and secure approach, than is offered by current protocols. The approach presented in this paper involves a protocol developed on blockchain technology. The underlying technology used in the voting system is a payment scheme, which offers anonymity of transactions, a trait not seen in blockchain protocols to date. The proposed protocol offers anonymity of voter transactions, while keeping the transactions private, and the election transparent and secure. The underlying payment protocol has not been modified in any way, the voting protocol merely offers an alternative use case

Extending the Helios Internet Voting Scheme Towards New Election Settings

Internet voting has long been a topic both of public discussion and also of scientific research. While the introduction of Internet voting may bring many advantages, it is further important to ensure an adequate level of security of the systems and underlying schemes that are used for casting and tallying the votes in order to encourage faith and acceptance for this relatively new way of voting. A number of cryptographic schemes have been proposed, that enable secure Internet voting. One of the most established and well-researched solutions is the Helios scheme, which is also implemented as an open-source system. Both its implementation and the scheme behind it has been extensively studied in the literature, and the Helios system has been used for numerous elections in practice, such as the IACR elections. However, there are election settings for which Helios is currently not appropriate, either due to infrastructure demands, required functionality for the voters or assurance of the security requirements. These kinds of election settings could benefit from the advantages that secure Internet voting provides. In this thesis we identify the election settings not currently supported by Helios, propose our extensions for each one of these settings and evaluate their security. Hence, this work describes four Internet voting schemes that are build upon Helios, with each scheme developed towards a specific setting. The first scheme presented here enables elections within the so-called boardroom voting setting. This setting is characterized by its decentralization, whereby all the tasks within the election are distributively performed by the voters themselves, without the support of a centralized infrastructure. The election in the boardroom voting setting are further conducted in an ad-hoc manner, so that limited time is available for preparation beforehand. We propose an extension of Helios that distributes the tasks of the voting system components in Helios among the voters. For this, we use cryptographic primitives such as decentralized key exchange with short authentication strings, distributed secret sharing and distributed decryption and Byzantine agreement. The second scheme extends Helios with proxy voting functionality. Proxy voting, as a newly emerged form of voting, enables the voter to delegate her voting right in the election to a trusted third-party, the so-called proxy, who is authorized to vote on the voter's behalf. This extension facilitates such delegation while assuring the security for delegating voters and for the proxies and preserves the security guarantees provided by Helios for the voters who vote directly (instead of delegating). For ensuring the security of our extension, we introduce the so-called delegation credentials that are assigned to the voters and are used to compute anonymized delegation tokens sent to the proxies to enable delegation. We further use cryptographic primitives such as proofs of knowledge and signatures of knowledge. The third scheme combines the first two settings to extend Helios towards the proxy boardroom voting setting, namely, a setting in which the elections are performed in a decentralized way as in boardroom voting, yet the voters who cannot participate in the election themselves are allowed to delegate their voting right to a trusted proxy before the election. The security of our extension is assured with threshold secret sharing and Pedersen commitments. The fourth scheme extends Helios by improving its security. As such, it introduces participation privacy, meaning that the voting system does not reveal which voters have participated in the election, while supporting verification that only the eligible voters have cast their ballots in the election. The extension furthermore introduces receipt-freeness, ensuring that the voter cannot create a receipt that proves to a third party how she voted, thus preventing vote selling. To ensure the security of the extension, a new kind of entity is introduced, the posting trustee, and a new kind of ballot, the so-called dummy ballot that is indistinguishable from a normal ballot cast by the voter, but does not modify the election result. We furthermore use disjunctive zero-knowledge proofs and proofs of signature knowledge to prove, that a sender of a particular ballot knows the private signature key of an eligible voter, or that the ballot is a dummy ballot. For each one of the extensions, the security model is provided, which describes the security requirements and the assumptions that are necessary for ensuring the security requirements (i.e. vote privacy or vote integrity), is provided. For the first three extensions, the security model is used as a base for the informal security evaluation, in which an informal argument is used to show, that the security requirements hold under the described assumptions. Conducting a formal security evaluation for these extensions is considered an important part of the future work, in which new formal definitions have to be developed. For the fourth extension, we provide a formal security analysis that relies on the formal definitions for the security requirements of vote privacy, vote integrity and eligibility, available in the literature. We furthermore introduce new formal definitions for participation privacy, receipt-freeness and fairness, which we also use for the formal proofs of our extension

Publicity verifiable ranked choice online voting system

Elections conducted on paper consume a lot of resources and contribute to the destruction of forests, which leads to climate deterioration. Moreover, such election process can make it difficult for some people to vote and it often leads to doubts in the validity of counting, in people submitting multiple votes, in ineligible people voting. In several well-known previous examples, doubts in the validity of paper elections lead to the need of recounting and even court battles to decide the validity of the outcome. Having a way to vote online could be an easier and more reliable solution. However, secure and verifiable methods of online voting need to be developed to achieve this. Recent online voting experiences in countries such as the United States, India and Brazil demonstrated that further research is needed to improve security guarantees for future elections, to ensure the confidentiality of votes and enable the verification of their integrity and validity. Electronic voting, to be successful, requires a more transparent and secure approach, than the approach that is offered by current electronic voting protocols. Advanced security methods are necessary to introduce effective online voting in the whole world. Currently, most online voting systems are centralized, which means that they involve central tallying authorities to take responsibility for verifying, tallying and publishing the final outcome of the election. These previous systems always assume that their central authorities are honest. Otherwise, the published final outcome cannot be trusted. The aim of our new research is to propose and investigate a decentralized ranked choice online voting systems, which never rely on any third party (such as tallying authorities), thereby significantly increasing the confidence and trust of the voters. The thesis presents several publicly verifiable online voting systems and indicates the processing steps and stages in the development of a publicity verifiable online voting system from centralized to semi-decentralized, to fully decentralized. By using Homomorphic cryptosystem, proof of zero knowledge and Blockchain technology, the proposed system in this thesis can achieve the following: (1) Flexible voting mechanism: voters can easily rank all candidates; (2) Publicity verifiable: the whole election procedure is transparent and verifiable by voters; (3) Self-tallying: the final outcome of the election can be computed by any individual voter; and (4) Fully decentralized: no tallying authority (or any other trusted third party) involved at all. The proposed systems presented in this thesis include protocols developed on Blockchain technology. The technology that is used as the basis for a secure online voting system is ``smart contract over Blockchain'', which offers a factor of the integrity of votes and has not been deeply studied in Blockchain technologies to date. The proposed voting protocols ensure confidentiality and preserve the voters' privacy while keeping the election procedures transparent and secure. The underlying Blockchain protocol has not been modified in any way, the voting scheme proposed merely offers an alternative use case of the protocol at hand, which could be presented as the basis for voting systems using Blockchain with further development of the underlying Blockchain protocols

Apollo: End-to-end Verifiable Internet Voting with Recovery from Vote Manipulation

End-to-end verifiable (E2E-V) voting protocols enable voters to check that their ballots have been correctly cast and recorded, and also enable anyone to check that the tally was correctly computed from the recorded votes. E2E-V voting protocols have been successfully designed for precinct-based voting. The problem of designing an electronic E2E-V voting protocol for remote voting is more challenging because one may not rely on polling place supervision and procedures for the security properties. This dissertation focuses on an E2E-V Internet voting protocol. Apollo, a modified version of popular remote voting protocol Helios, is proposed to address some of the vulnerabilities of Helios, improving on the feasibility of Internet voting. In particular, Apollo does not possess Helios’ major known vulnerability, where a dishonest voting terminal can change the vote after it obtains the voter’s credential. A proof of the security properties of Apollo is presented. Unfortunately, neither Helios nor Apollo provides ballot secrecy, because the voting terminal knows the vote. PrivApollo, a protocol that improves Apollo by providing ballot secrecy even if the voting terminal is dishonest, is proposed. A voting system with low usability will typically not achieve its security goals because users will tend not to use it correctly. Users might not even complete all steps, in which case they might end up not voting without realizing it. A usability experiment is presented, which explores whether adding an educational session before voting on Apollo changed the time taken by voters to successfully cast a ballot and whether it changed how often they completed optional tasks that would enhance the security of the protocol

Approval of George W. Bush: Economic and media impacts

George W. Bush\u27s approval rate had its shares of ups and downs. In this time series study I analyze the empirical evidence of the media\u27s and economy\u27s impact on his approval rate from 2001-2009. People tend to hold the president responsible for the country\u27s economic performance and the media influences people\u27s opinions of the president through agenda setting and priming. I operationalize the media influence on people into an independent variable. My economic independent variables are the monthly percent change in inflation rate, unemployment rate, and personal income. The dependent variable is the president\u27s approval rate. This study seeks to understand the relationship between the economy, media, and George W. Bush\u27s approval rate and add insight to the body of approval research

Focus on the USA : representing the nation in early 21st century documentary films

Written by the 42 students registered in the course Cultural Studies (2019-20), BA in English Studies, UAB and edited by their teacherAn analysis of 90 high quality documentary films (2000-2020) considering how the USA is represented in the

Crafting the JFK legend: How the Kennedy story is constructed and retold

This thesis explores how the ambivalently multifarious Kennedy ‘stories’ of JFK as Icon or Myth are constructed and how its ‘telling’ has been profoundly influenced by authorial intent. In contrast with much of the Kennedy literature, that often blurs the two, the thesis therefore works with a strong distinction between ‘Icon’ as having wholly positive connotations and ‘Myth’ as a narrative which either falsifies or negatively debunks any pre-existing positive accounts of its subject matter.My focus on newspaper articles, in particular from The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News, arises from the familiarly powerful claim that journalists write ‘the first draft of history’, although the thesis also reaches beyond journalism. Crucial to the argument is E. H. Carr’s historiography and its contention that historical facts are selected and presented according to particular hypotheses utilized by historians of any stripe for their own particular purposes. The thesis uses J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts to demonstrate how the telling of the Kennedy story has variously employed techniques not only supposedly just to describe his legacy (the locutionary speech act) but also a) to create a legacy (the illocutionary speech act) and b) to influence audience attitudes toward the legacy (the perlocutionary speech act).The malleability of the Kennedy story helps to explain the reason why there remains so many attempts to retell it. The thesis also opens up consideration as to why it is this particular story that so many still want to hear