An Anonymous Voting Scheme based on Confirmation Numbers

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2003

An electronic voting system makes it possible for the voters to cast their ballots over the computer network. Hence, voters 11 can participate in elections without having to go to the polling places, which is more convenient and efficient. To design a 12 practical voting scheme, Mu and Varadharajan have recently proposed an anonymous secure electronic voting scheme to be 13 applied over the network. It does not only protect voters' privacy and prevent double voting, but also suits large-scale elections. 14 However, the scheme has a weakness in security; that is, some voters may still double vote without being detected and may 15 even reveal information they should not. In this paper, we shall show this weakness and improve the scheme to increase the 16 protection against fraudulence. 17 D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 18 19 23

Proceedings of the 9th Joint Conference on Information Sciences (JCIS), 2006

Due to convenience and efficiency, electronic voting (e-voting) techniques gradually replace traditional paper-based voting activities in some developed countries. A secure anonymous e-voting system has to satisfy many properties, such as completeness, tally correctness, and uncoercibility, where the uncoercibility property is the most difficult one to be achieved. Since each voter can obtain a voting receipt in an electronic voting system, coercibility and bribe (vote-buying and vote-selling are included) become more and more serious in electronic voting environments than traditional paper-based voting environments. Unfortunately, most of the solutions, like receipt-freeness or untappable channels, proposed in the literature, are impractical owing to lack of efficiency or too complicated to be implemented. It will make uncoercible e-voting systems unacceptable by the people. In order to cope with the drawbacks of the previous schemes, this paper will present a generic idea, which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components, on electronic voting to achieve the uncoercibility property and other requirements. The proposed method is an efficient and quite practical solution to match the current environments of electronic voting.

IEEE CSF, 2020

In e-voting protocols, cryptographers must balance usability with strong security guarantees, such as privacy and verifiability. In traditional e-voting protocols, privacy is often provided by a trusted authority that learns the votes and computes the tally. Some protocols replace the trusted authority by a set of authorities, and privacy is guaranteed if less than a threshold number of authorities are corrupt. For verifiability, stronger security is demanded. Typically, corrupt authorities that try to fake the tally result must always be detected. To provide verifiability, many e-voting protocols use Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs (NIZK). Thanks to their non-interactive nature, NIZK allow anybody, including third parties that do not participate in the protocol, to verify the correctness of the tally. Therefore, NIZK can be used to obtain universal verifiability. Additionally, NIZK also improve usability because they allow voters to cast a vote non-interactively. The disadvantage of NIZK is that their security is based on setup assumptions such as the common reference string (CRS) or the random oracle model. The former requires a trusted party to generate a CRS. The latter, though a popular model for secure protocol design, has been shown to be unsound. We address the design of e-voting protocols that provide verifiability without any trust assumptions. We show that Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable proofs can be used for this purpose. Our e-voting protocols are private under the Decision Linear assumption, while perfect individual verifiability, i.e. a fake tally is detected with probability 1, holds unconditionally. Perfect universal verifiability requires a trusted public bulletin board. We remark that our definition of verifiability does not consider eligibility or end-to-end verifiability. First, we present a general construction that supports any tally function. Then, we show how to efficiently instantiate it for specific types of elections through Groth-Sahai proofs.

2023

Traditional voting systems mainly comprise of paper polling, electronic ballot system (EVM), mechanical devices, etc., and demand the physical presence of the voters. In the new age of digitization, the electronic voting system has come up with a unique facility to cast votes from any discreet place. However, the e-voting system has to face several challenges regarding security and privacy. To overcome such obstructions, blockchain is introduced in e-voting applications that preserve anonymity, security, and consistency of voter-related information with the help of Merkle tree and hash digest. Hence, any discrepancy can immediately be detected whenever the hash values of the respective block have been modified and consequently, the whole block is discarded. In this research, a novel e-voting scheme is proposed following the decentralized service-oriented architecture of Exonum private blockchain, hybrid consensus algorithm, and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Helmen (ECDH) protocol to agree upon a secure session key among different participants. Moreover, the proposed scheme (ECC-EXONUM-eVOTING) employs a zero-knowledge protocol and is customized to work over idemix technologies with a blind signature scheme. Numerous well-known cryptographic attacks are analyzed formally using the probabilistic random oracle model and informally for validating the security strength of ECC-EXONUM-eVOTING. As a result, it is found that the proposed scheme is well-defended against all potential security concerns. Furthermore, the scheme is simulated using both Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and Scyther tools to demonstrate the proposed scheme is not prone to any security attacks. Finally, it is concluded that the proposed scheme is well-suited for secure e-voting applications. INDEX TERMS Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT). B LOCKCHAIN technology was first invented and used as a peer-to-peer payment system using Bitcoin by Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 [1, 2]. Then, it this concept is incorporated into various applications such as digital voting, health care applications, e-voting systems, etc. [2-4]. Fundamentally, blockchain is a type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that follows a decentralized, permissionless, distributed ledger for a public blockchain and a permissionintegrated, decentralized, or distributed ledger for private

We present an improvement of Ohkubo et al.'s e-voting protocol [OMA + 99]: We provide that the validator's signature is attached directly to the vote although the vote has been encrypted before. Thus verifiability does not end before tallying like in the original scheme but is pervasive even beyond the end of the election. This prevents manipulation of the plaintext votes and offers verifiability to the public instead of restricting it to the talliers. Moreover, privacy can be ensured without using blind signatures, which facilitates receipt-freeness. Our variant of the scheme also allows the voter to seemingly comply with the demand of a coercer while actually casting the vote she intended.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2022

Current methods of voter identification, especially in India, are highly primitive and error-prone, depending on verification by (mostly) sight, by highly trusted election officials. This paper attempts to provide a trustless and zero-knowledge method of voter identification, while simultaneously reducing error. It also proposes a method for vote verification, that is, ensuring that the vote cast by a legal voter is registered as cast and tallied as registered. While numerous methods of zero-knowledge identification are available in the literature, very few of those are implementable on a large scale and subject to the type of constraints that are present, eg., in India. This paper attempts to provide a solution which, while preserving the integrity of the available methods, will also be more scalable and cost-effective.

The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES'07), 2007

We propose a practical verifiable e-voting protocol which guarantees e-voting requirements: privacy, eligibility, uniqueness, uncoercibility, fairness, accuracy, robustness, individual verifiability, and universal verifiability. Unlike existing e-voting protocols we employ dynamic ballot instead of predefined usual ballot in order to strengthen accuracy and fairness of the protocol. In dynamic ballots, the ordering of candidates in the ballots is dynamically created and changes for each voter. Therefore the proposed protocol is called as "DynaVote". DynaVote does not use complex cryptographic algorithms such as homomorphic encryption and does not require anonymous communication channels such as mix-nets since it employs PVID (Pseudo-Voter Identity) scheme which relies on blind signature. Besides it has no physical assumption such as untappable channels. Hence, DynaVote is a practical e-voting protocol for large scale elections. DynaVote is performed over a network such as the Internet. In order to achieve uncoercibility, DynaVote allows recasting without sacrificing uniqueness.

Information Security for Global Information Infrastructures, 2000

This paper describes a new receipt-free electronic voting system for an open network. In our system, the voters vote with anonymous voting passes, which is motivated by the E-Cash protocol [1]. We have modified the E-Cash protocol such that the pass is non-transferable. A modified commitment scheme is also employed so that the administrator cannot change the vote even if it knows the content of the ballot. Our system is designed for realising the digitalization of large-scale elections conducted by the government. Various aspects involved in an election are considered during protocol design so that the potential cheats of either the voters or the administrators are prevented.

2019

This document describes the principles for building an anonymous decentralized e-voting system. It is proposed to use a ring signature mechanism to ensure anonymity of voters and blockchain technology to ensure the integrity and transparency of the transaction history. Thus, it can be beneficial to use such a combination to ensure the maximal robustness of the systems in the realworld conditions with the persistence of a potential malefactor that is interested to disrupt the work of the system, change the data in some way or influence the processes that are happening inside of the system.

Computer Science Review, 2013

One of the most challenging aspects in computer-supported voting is to combine the apparently conflicting requirements of privacy and verifiability. On the one hand, privacy requires that a vote cannot be traced back from the result to a voter, while on the other hand, verifiability states that a voter can trace the effect of her vote on the result. This can be addressed using various privacy-enabling cryptographic primitives which also offer verifiability.