An Internet Voting System Supporting User Privacy

Abstract

This work introduces the A system 1 , an Internetbased, free and open source electronic voting system which employs strong cryptography. Our system is a fully functional e-voting platform and enjoys a number of security properties, such as robustness, trust distribution, ballot privacy, auditability and verifiability. It can readily implement and carry out various voting procedures in parallel and can be used for small scale boardroom/department-wide voting as well as largescale elections. In addition, A employs a flexible voting scheme which allows the system to carry out procedures such as surveys or other data collection activities. A offers a unique opportunity to study cryptographic voting protocols from a systems perspective and to explore the security and usability of electronic voting systems.

End-to-End Verifiable Elections in the Standard Model

“…Helios, culminates a long line of previous schemes that employ homomorphic type of voting, cf. [18,23,33] and utilizes the Benaloh challenge [5] as the fundamental mechanism to attain verifiability. Helios by design requires the voter to utilize a voter supporting device to prepare a ciphertext and after an indeterminate number of trials, the voter will cast the produced ciphertext.…”

Security in Large-Scale Internet Elections: A Retrospective Analysis of Elections in Estonia, The Netherlands, and Switzerland

“…Blind-signature-based primitives were introduced by Fujioka et al [19], are used in [8] and [19] and adopted in Sensus [14]. Further protocols are provided in [26], who also provide examples for some other approaches that are not based on any of the above primitives.…”

“…Reference [26] identifies three general design approaches for building evoting systems based on three primitives. Mixnet-based primitives, introduced by Chaum [10], are part of the protocols of [24] and [39] and are used in the e-voting system SureVote [9].…”

EVIV: An end-to-end verifiable Internet voting system

“…The resulting voting protocols can be roughly categorized into three main categories accordingly to the vote anonymization technique used: mix-nets (Chaum, 1981;Juels et al, 2005;Furukawa et al, 2010), blind signatures (Chaum, 1988;Ohkubo et al, 1999;Joaquim et al, 2003) and homomorphic voting systems (Cohen and Fischer, 1985;Cramer et al, 1997;Juels et al, 2005;Kiayias et al, 2006). Usually vote protocols assume a "cryptographic capable" voter, however the incapacity of a common voter to perform cryptographic operations means that the voter must trust the vote client machine to perform the voter's side cryptography, e.g.…”

“…the (in) security of the vote casting PC that can be the home or office computer of even a computer at a cybercafé or at a public library (Jefferson et al, 2004;Kiayias et al, 2006;Dagstuhl Accord, 2007). Usually, Internet voting systems require trust on the vote client platform (the vote casting PC ) to give some guarantees of voter's privacy and election's integrity; however, this is not easily achievable given that vote casting PCs are in uncontrolled environments and often vulnerable to a number of attacks (e.g.…”