Analysis Of Electronic Voting Schemes In The Real World

Voting is at the heart of a country’s democracy. Assurance in the integrity of the electoral process is pivotal for voters to have any trust in the system. Often, electronic voting schemes proposed in the literature, or even implemented in real world elections do not always consider all issues that may exist in the environment in which they might be deployed. In this paper, we identify some real - world issues and threats to electronic voting schemes. We then use the threats we have identified to present an analysis of schemes recently used in Australia and Estonia and present recommendations to mitigate threats to such schemes when deployed in an untrustworthy environment

A note on replay attacks that violate privacy in electronic voting schemes

In our previous work, we have shown that the Helios 2.0 electronic voting protocol does not satisfy ballot independence and exploit this weakness to violate privacy; in particular, the Helios scheme is shown to be vulnerable to a replay attack. In this note we examine two further electronic voting protocols -- namely, the schemes by Sako & Kilian and Schoenmakers -- that are known not to satisfy ballot independence and demonstrate replay attacks that violate privacy.Dans un résultat précédent, nous avons montré que le protocole de vote électronique Helios 2.0 ne garantissait pas l'indépendance des votes et que cela pouvait être utilisé pour compromettre la confidentialité des votes. Cette attaque repose en particulier sur le fait que le protocole Helios est vulnérable aux attaques par rejeu. Dans cette note, nous examinons le cas de deux autres protocoles de vote de la littérature -- les protocoles Sako & Kilian et Schoenmakers -- qui sont connus pour ne pas garantir l'indépendance des votes. Nous montrons comment cette vulnérabilité peut être à nouveau exploitée pour compromettre la confidentialité

A voting scheme with post-quantum security based on physical laws

Traditional cryptography is under huge threat along of the evolution of quantum information and computing. In this paper, we propose a new post-quantum voting scheme based on physical laws by using encrypted no-key protocol to transmit message in the channel, which ensures the post-quantum security. Unlike lattice-based and multivariate-based electronic voting schemes, whose security is based on the computational problems assumption that has not been solved by effective quantum algorithms until now, the security of the voting scheme based on the physical laws is depended on inherent limitations of quantum computers and not influenced by the evolution of new quantum algorithms. In detail, we also rigorously demonstrate that the scheme achieves the post-quantum security and all properties necessary for voting scheme such as the completeness, robustness, privacy, eligibility, unreusability, fairness, and verifiability.Comment: 23pages,1figure,5table

Planteamientos sobre Sistemas de Voto y Democracia Electrónica.

This paper present a preliminary analysis of electronic voting schemes and the requirements of Electronic Democracy as a part of the work carried out by the authors in the VOTESCRIPT project (TIC2000-1630-C02). A summary of the most relevant experiences on this field are discussed and a basic classification of them is pointed out, according to different degrees on process computerization. As it is shown, most of them only take into account a technological perspective, just trying to imitate the conventional voting schemes. A citizen-base bottom-up perspective is proposed to analyze the implementation of electronic voting systems in order to avoid citizen rejection. The paper also hallmarks the new technical possibilities created to be applied to the development of citizen?s right realm. Further than conventional voting schemes, the paper proposes the use of advanced security services to extend conceptualization of Electronic Democracy in which citizens have a key role on decision making processes

An Electronic Voting System Using GSM Mobile Technology

Electronic voting systems have the potential to improve traditional voting procedures by providing added convenience and flexibility to the voter. Numerous electronic voting schemes have been proposed in the past, but most of them have failed to provide voter authentication in an efficient and transparent way. On the other hand, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is the most widely used mobile networking standard. There are more than one billion GSM users worldwide that represent a large user potential, not just for mobile telephony, but also for other mobile applications that exploit the mature GSM infrastructure. In this paper, an electronic voting scheme using GSM mobile technology is presented. By integrating an electronic voting scheme with the GSM infrastructure, we are able to exploit existing GSM authentication mechanisms and provide enhanced voter authentication and mobility while maintaining voter privacy

Settling for limited privacy: how much does it help?

This thesis explores practical and theoretical aspects of several privacy-providing technologies, including tools for anonymous web-browsing, verifiable electronic voting schemes, and private information retrieval from databases. State-of-art privacy-providing schemes are frequently impractical for implementational reasons or for sheer information-theoretical reasons due to the amount of information that needs to be transmitted. We have been researching the question of whether relaxing the requirements on such schemes, in particular settling for imperfect but sufficient in real-world situations privacy, as opposed to perfect privacy, may be helpful in producing more practical or more efficient schemes. This thesis presents three results. The first result is the introduction of caching as a technique for providing anonymous web-browsing at the cost of sacrificing some functionality provided by anonymizing systems that do not use caching. The second result is a coercion-resistant electronic voting scheme with nearly perfect privacy and nearly perfect voter verifiability. The third result consists of some lower bounds and some simple upper bounds on the amount of communication in nearly private information retrieval schemes; our work is the first in-depth exploration of private information schemes with imperfect privacy