1,455 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
Electronic Voting: the Devil is in the Details
Observing electronic voting from an international point of view gives some
perspective about its genesis and evolution. An analysis of the voting process
through its cultural, ontological, legal and political dimensions explains the
difficulty to normalize this process. It appears that international
organizations are not capable to properly defend the fundamental rights of the
citizens. The approach that was taken when DRE voting computers appeared seems
to have reoccured with VVAT voting computers and the european e-poll project.Comment: 9 page
The New South Wales iVote System: Security Failures and Verification Flaws in a Live Online Election
In the world's largest-ever deployment of online voting, the iVote Internet
voting system was trusted for the return of 280,000 ballots in the 2015 state
election in New South Wales, Australia. During the election, we performed an
independent security analysis of parts of the live iVote system and uncovered
severe vulnerabilities that could be leveraged to manipulate votes, violate
ballot privacy, and subvert the verification mechanism. These vulnerabilities
do not seem to have been detected by the election authorities before we
disclosed them, despite a pre-election security review and despite the system
having run in a live state election for five days. One vulnerability, the
result of including analytics software from an insecure external server,
exposed some votes to complete compromise of privacy and integrity. At least
one parliamentary seat was decided by a margin much smaller than the number of
votes taken while the system was vulnerable. We also found protocol flaws,
including vote verification that was itself susceptible to manipulation. This
incident underscores the difficulty of conducting secure elections online and
carries lessons for voters, election officials, and the e-voting research
community
Cast-as-Intended Mechanism with Return Codes Based on PETs
We propose a method providing cast-as-intended verifiability for remote
electronic voting. The method is based on plaintext equivalence tests (PETs),
used to match the cast ballots against the pre-generated encrypted code tables.
Our solution provides an attractive balance of security and functional
properties. It is based on well-known cryptographic building blocks and relies
on standard cryptographic assumptions, which allows for relatively simple
security analysis. Our scheme is designed with a built-in fine-grained
distributed trust mechanism based on threshold decryption. It, finally, imposes
only very little additional computational burden on the voting platform, which
is especially important when voters use devices of restricted computational
power such as mobile phones. At the same time, the computational cost on the
server side is very reasonable and scales well with the increasing ballot size
Distributed Protocols at the Rescue for Trustworthy Online Voting
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in
many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting
technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online
voting protocols and recall therefore their security concepts with its trust
assumptions. Inspired by the Bitcoin protocol, the prospects of distributed
online voting protocols are analysed. No trusted authority is assumed to ensure
ballot secrecy. Further, the integrity of the voting is enforced by all voters
themselves and without a weakest link, the protocol becomes more robust. We
introduce a taxonomy of notions of distribution in online voting protocols that
we apply on selected online voting protocols. Accordingly, blockchain-based
protocols seem to be promising for online voting due to their similarity with
paper-based protocols
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
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
Comparing "challenge-based" and "code-based" internet voting verification implementations
Internet-enabled voting introduces an element of invisibility and unfamiliarity into the voting process, which makes it very different from traditional voting. Voters might be concerned about their vote being recorded correctly and included in the final tally. To mitigate mistrust, many Internet-enabled voting systems build verifiability into their systems. This allows voters to verify that their votes have been cast as intended, stored as cast and tallied as stored at the conclusion of the voting period. Verification implementations have not been universally successful, mostly due to voter difficulties using them. Here, we evaluate two cast as intended verification approaches in a lab study: (1) "Challenge-Based" and (2) "Code-Based". We assessed cast-as-intended vote verification efficacy, and identified usability issues related to verifying and/or vote casting. We also explored acceptance issues post-verification, to see whether our participants were willing to engage with Internet voting in a real election. Our study revealed the superiority of the code-based approach, in terms of ability to verify effectively. In terms of real-life Internet voting acceptance, convenience encourages acceptance, while security concerns and complexity might lead to rejection
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