Authentication with Weaker Trust Assumptions for Voting Systems

Abstract

Some voting systems are reliant on external authentication services. Others use cryptography to implement their own. We combine digital signatures and non-interactive proofs to derive a generic construction for voting systems with their own authentication mechanisms, from systems that rely on external authentication services. We prove that our construction produces systems satisfying ballot secrecy and election verifiability, assuming the underlying voting system does. Moreover, we observe that works based on similar ideas provide neither ballot secrecy nor election verifiability. Finally, we demonstrate applicability of our results by applying our construction to the Helios voting system.

A Framework for QKD-based Electronic Voting

“… All encrypted votes are shown on the bulletin board. The Helios system achieves the Ballot secrecy [36].  The bulletin board permits only one vote to link with an identity [12].…”

Exploiting re-voting in the Helios election system

“…Alternatively, voters can be issued with credentials and cryptography can be used to ensure that only voters can construct authorised ballots (i.e., authorised ballots are unforgeable [30, §1]). For instance, Quaglia & Smyth [31] replace tokens with digital signatures. But, solutions reliant on cryptography seem to require expensive infrastructures for voter credentials and seemingly ignore the problem of corruption during the registration procedure [15, §4].…”