Voting Technologies and Trust (original) (raw)
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A Light-Weight e-Voting System with Distributed Trust
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2007
A new agent-based scheme for secure electronic voting is proposed in the paper. The scheme is universal and can be realized in a network of stationary and mobile electronic devices. The proposed mechanism supports the implementation of a user interface simulating traditional election cards, semi-mechanical voting devices or utilization purely electronic voting booths. The security mechanisms applied in the system are based on verified cryptographic primitives: the secure secret sharing scheme and Merkle's puzzles. Due to pre-computations during the generation of agent, the voter need not to do computations. The proposed distributed trust architecture makes the crucial stage of sending votes elastic, reliable, and effective.
TrustVote : A Proposal for a Hybrid E-Voting System
2009
This paper presents a hybrid e-voting system, in which a transparent e-voting protocol is embedded in a traditional paper-based voting procedure. To guarantee vote anonymity, the protocol itself is based on a scalable blind signature scheme with multiple authorities. An anonymous channel is used to cast the encrypted votes onto the public board. To prevent vote buying and vote coercion, we depart from the mainstream approach of taking additional measures to guarantee receipt-freeness. Instead, we propose to exploit the existence of a receipt to allow vote revocations over the enclosing paper-based voting procedure.
A practical, secure, and auditable e-voting system
Journal of Information Security and Applications
A cryptographic electronic voting system is proposed, to replace the conventional voting methods, which are widely used in most developing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The proposed e-voting system is based on the concept of Prêt à Voter, which is a paper ballot e-voting scheme. Mixnet based e-voting schemes such as Prêt à Voter use mix servers to create anonymous channels. These schemes have some shortcomings; Mixnets need complex protocols for generating and maintaining shared mix keys, as well as for mixing and proving correctness of the shuffles. Moreover, Mixnets are complex to implement on a large scale. Mixnets are also vulnerable to corrupt or faulty mix servers as well. The proposed e-voting scheme eliminates the need for anonymous channels to anonymize the votes in Mixnet based e-voting schemes, yet provides comparable level of security and vote anonymity with less system complexity. The proposed e-voting scheme uses paper ballots, due to its familiarity among the public, but with strong cryptographic algorithms with proven security features, to provide enhanced level of ballot secrecy, verifiability and security. The proposed scheme is simple, secure, practical, and auditable. Security evaluation is conducted based on the critical and desirable properties of e-voting to support the claimed aspects. Threat analysis of the proposed e-voting system had been conducted to prove its resistance to well-known attacks on e-voting schemes and systems. A proof of concept implementation and simulation of the proposed e-voting scheme was developed to elucidate its efficiency, practicality, and scalability. The research proposal has the potential to be deployed as a trustworthy evoting system, to replace the conventional voting methods in developing countries.
A Trust-Centered Approach for Building E-Voting Systems
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
eVoting is a challenging approach for increasing eParticipation. However, lack of citizens' trust seems to be a main obstacle that hinders its successful realization. In this paper we propose a trust-centered engineering approach for building eVoting systems that people can trust, based on transparent design and implementation phases. The approach is based on three components: the decomposition of eVoting systems into "layers of trust" for reducing the complexity of managing trust issues in smaller manageable layers, the application of a risk analysis methodology able to identify and document security critical aspects of the eVoting system, and a cryptographically secure eVoting protocol. Our approach is pragmatic rather than theoretical in the sense that it sidesteps the controversy that besets the nature of trust in information systems and starts with a working definition of trust as people's positive attitude towards a system that performs its operations transparently.
Measures to establish trust in internet voting
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance - ICEGOV '11, 2011
Technical research has achieved strong advances in addressing security concerns in internet voting, yet the solutions are complicated and difficult to explain to the public. Accordingly, internet voting commonly faces opposition despite the benefits voters and authorities may expect. It appears that security features are only one premise underlying a system's acceptance among the electorate. The other challenge is to exploit these features at establishing the required trust among the public. In this paper we introduce a number of measures meant to help at gaining trust. We hereby emphasize the importance of taking the exposition of a system's security features and the remaining risks as the foundation of any strategy. After describing the proposed measures and discussing both their advantages and pitfalls, we relate them to four commonly known applied internet voting systems.
Electronic voting: algorithmic and implementation issues
36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the, 2003
Electronic Transactions over the Internet, particularly using the World Wide Web have become an integral part of economic life. Recently also the public sector has started to use the new medium for its administrative processes. This paper analyses several approaches to implement an electronic voting system and discusses them with a view to voter anonymity and protection from manipulations. The paper then develops an algorithm designed to guarantee anonymity of the voter and to avoid the risk of manipulation of votes. The algorithm is based upon the strict separation of voter registration and submission of votes, which implies that certain information has to be stored on a secure media. The paper discusses the security criteria and possible implementation options for such secure storage.
The Theory and Implementation of an Electronic Voting System
We describe the theory behind a practical voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption. We give an example of an ElGamal-style encryption scheme, which can be used as the underlying cryptosystem. Then, we present efficient honest verifier zero-knowledge proofs that make the messages in the voting scheme shorter and easier to compute and verify, for voters as well as authorities, than in currently known schemes. Finally, we discuss various issues connected with the security of a practical implementation of the scheme for on-line voting. Notably, this includes minimizing risks that are beyond what can be handled with cryptography, such as attacks that try to substitute the software running on client machines.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2020
In this paper we revisit the seminal coercion-resistant e-voting protocol by Juels, Catalano and Jakobsson (JCJ) and in particular the attempts to make it usable and practical. In JCJ the user needs to handle cryptographic credentials and be able to fake these in case of coercion. In a series of three papers Neumann et al. analysed the usability of JCJ, and constructed and implemented a practical credential handling system using a smart card which unlock the true credential via a PIN code, respectively fake the credential via faking the PIN. We present several attacks and problems with the security of this protocol, especially an attack on coercion-resistance due to information leakage from the removal of duplicate ballots. Another problem, already stressed but not solved by Neumann et al, is that PIN typos happen frequently and would invalidate the cast vote without the voter being able to detect this. We construct different protocols which repair these problems. Further, the smart card is a trusted component which can invalidate cast votes without detection and can be removed by a coercer to force abstention, i.e. presenting a single point of failure. Hence we choose to make the protocols hardware-flexible i.e. also allowing the credentials to be store by ordinary means, but still being PIN based and providing PIN error resilience. Finally, one of the protocols has a linear tally complexity to ensure an efficient scheme also with many voters.
TRVote: A New, Trustworthy and Robust Electronic Voting System
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., 2016
We propose a new Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE)-based voting system that we call TRVote. The reliability of TRVote is ensured during the vote generation phase where the random challenges are generated by the voters instead of utilizing the random number generator of the machine. Namely, the challenges of voters are utilized to prevent and detect a malicious behavior of a corrupted voting machine. Due to the unpredictability of the challenges, the voting machine cannot cheat voters without being detected. TRVote provides two kinds of verification; “cast-as-intended” is ensured during the vote generation phase and “recorded-as-cast” is ensured through a secure Web Bulletin Board (WBB). More concretely, voters can verify that their votes are cast as intended via a zero-knowledge proof on a printed receipt using QR codes. After the election, the central server broadcasts all receipts in a secure WBB where the voters (or, perhaps proxies) can check whether their receipts appear correc...