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

A two authorities electronic vote scheme

[EN] In this paper we propose a new electronic multi-authority voting system based on blind signatures. We focus on the open problem of the efficiency of electronic voting systems. Most of the proposed systems rely on complex architectures or expensive proofs, in this work we aim to reduce the time-complexity of the voting process, both for the voter and the authorities involved. Our system is focused on simplicity and it is based on the assumption of two unrelated entities. This simplicity makes our approach scalable and flexible to multiple kinds of elections. We propose a method that limits the number of authorities to only 2 of them; we reduce the overall number of modular operations; and, propose a method which cut downs the interactions needed to cast a vote. The result is a voting protocol whose complexity scales linearly with the number of votes.Larriba-Flor, AM.; Sempere Luna, JM.; López Rodríguez, D. (2020). A two authorities electronic vote scheme. Computers & Security. 97:1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2020.101940S11297Bloom, B. H. (1970). Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors. Communications of the ACM, 13(7), 422-426. doi:10.1145/362686.362692Brams S., Fishburn P.C.. 2007. Approval voting Springer ScienceCarroll, T. E., & Grosu, D. (2009). A secure and anonymous voter-controlled election scheme. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 32(3), 599-606. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2008.07.010Chaum, D. L. (1981). Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 24(2), 84-90. doi:10.1145/358549.358563Cramer, R., Gennaro, R., & Schoenmakers, B. (1997). A secure and optimally efficient multi-authority election scheme. European Transactions on Telecommunications, 8(5), 481-490. doi:10.1002/ett.4460080506Desmedt, Y. G. (2010). Threshold cryptography. European Transactions on Telecommunications, 5(4), 449-458. doi:10.1002/ett.4460050407Elgamal, T. (1985). A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 31(4), 469-472. doi:10.1109/tit.1985.1057074Juang, W.-S. (2002). A Verifiable Multi-Authority Secret Election Allowing Abstention from Voting. The Computer Journal, 45(6), 672-682. doi:10.1093/comjnl/45.6.672Menezes A., van Oorschot P.C., Vanstone S.A.. 1996. Handbook of Applied Cryptography.Parhami, B. (1994). Voting algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 43(4), 617-629. doi:10.1109/24.370218Rabin, M. O. (1980). Probabilistic Algorithms in Finite Fields. SIAM Journal on Computing, 9(2), 273-280. doi:10.1137/0209024Rabin, M. O. (1983). Transaction protection by beacons. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 27(2), 256-267. doi:10.1016/0022-0000(83)90042-9Salazar, J. L., Piles, J. J., Ruiz-Mas, J., & Moreno-Jiménez, J. M. (2010). Security approaches in e-cognocracy. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 32(5-6), 256-265. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2010.01.004Nguyen, T. A. T., & Dang, T. K. (2013). Enhanced security in internet voting protocol using blind signature and dynamic ballots. Electronic Commerce Research, 13(3), 257-272. doi:10.1007/s10660-013-9120-5Wu, Z.-Y., Wu, J.-C., Lin, S.-C., & Wang, C. (2014). An electronic voting mechanism for fighting bribery and coercion. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 40, 139-150. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2013.09.011Yang, X., Yi, X., Nepal, S., Kelarev, A., & Han, F. (2018). A Secure Verifiable Ranked Choice Online Voting System Based on Homomorphic Encryption. IEEE Access, 6, 20506-20519. doi:10.1109/access.2018.2817518Yi, X., & Okamoto, E. (2013). Practical Internet voting system. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 36(1), 378-387. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2012.05.00

SUVS: Secure Unencrypted Voting Scheme

[EN] In this paper, we propose a light-weight electronic voting protocol. The approach used by our protocol to conceal the ballots does not imply encryption, and guarantees the privacy of the direction of the vote unless all the contestants (parties) agree to do so. Our method is based on the division of the ballot into different pieces of information, which separately reveal no information at all, and that can be latter aggregated to recover the original vote. We show that, despite its simplicity, this scheme is powerful, it does not sacrifice any of the security properties demanded in a formal electronic voting protocol, and, furthermore, even in post-quantum scenarios, neither the casted votes can be tampered with, nor the identity of any elector can be linked with the direction of her vote.Results related to Spanish Patent Application number P202131209.Larriba, AM.; López Rodríguez, D. (2022). SUVS: Secure Unencrypted Voting Scheme. Informatica. 33(4):749-769. https://doi.org/10.15388/22-INFOR50374976933

Electronic voting system for RIT Student Government elections

Recent studies argue that traditional voting systems do not encourage increased voter participation due to constraints in time, location, accuracy, and, accessibility. To ensure the rights of a democratic society and to enhance and secure the voting rights of citizens by surpassing all the limitations of the traditional voting system, the development of an electronic voting system is an attractive solution. Research on secure electronic voting systems has been conducted for at least the past two decades. We propose to develop an electronic voting system, called the Rochester Institute of Technology Student Government Election System (SGEES) based on Damgard et al. This voting scheme will use efficient honest-verifier zero-knowledge, which, unlike previous election schemes, are both easy to compute and to verify for both voters and authorities. Our proposed electronic voting system will allow convenient and confident voting while maintaining the accuracy of election results. This project will address the security requirements for electronic voting over the Internet, including privacy, completeness, soundness, receipt-freeness, and universal verifiability. In particular, we will research the feasibility of the voting scheme and protocols by studying three related cryptographical theories: homomorphic encryption, efficient honest-verifier zero-knowledge proofs, and threshold decryption cryptosystem

Lattice-Based proof of a shuffle

In this paper we present the first fully post-quantum proof of a shuffle for RLWE encryption schemes. Shuffles are commonly used to construct mixing networks (mix-nets), a key element to ensure anonymity in many applications such as electronic voting systems. They should preserve anonymity even against an attack using quantum computers in order to guarantee long-term privacy. The proof presented in this paper is built over RLWE commitments which are perfectly binding and computationally hiding under the RLWE assumption, thus achieving security in a post-quantum scenario. Furthermore we provide a new definition for a secure mixing node (mix-node) and prove that our construction satisfies this definition.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Efficiency Comparison of Various Approaches in E-Voting Protocols

In order to ensure the security of remote Internet voting, the systems that are currently proposed make use of complex cryptographic techniques. Since these techniques are often computationally extensive, efficiency becomes an issue. Identifying the most efficient Internet voting system is a non-trivial task -- in particular for someone who does not have a sufficient knowledge on the systems that currently exist, and on the cryptographic components that constitute those systems. Aside from these components, the efficiency of Internet voting also depends on various parameters, such as expected number of participating voters and ballot complexity. In this paper we propose a tool for evaluating the efficiency of different approaches for an input scenario, that could be of use to election organizers deciding how to implement the voting system

Making Sigma-Protocols Non-interactive Without Random Oracles

Damg˚ard, Fazio and Nicolosi (TCC 2006) gave a transformation of Sigma-protocols, 3-move honest verifier zero-knowledge proofs, into efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments for a designated verifier. Their transformation uses additively homomorphic encryption to encrypt the verifier’s challenge, which the prover uses to compute an encrypted answer. The transformation does not rely on the random oracle model but proving soundness requires a complexity leveraging assumption. We propose an alternative instantiation of their transformation and show that it achieves culpable soundness without complexity leveraging. This improves upon an earlier result by Ventre and Visconti (Africacrypt 2009), who used a different construction which achieved weak culpable soundness. We demonstrate how our construction can be used to prove validity of encrypted votes in a referendum. This yields a voting system with homomorphic tallying that does not rely on the Fiat-Shamir heuristic