Abstract
Most electronic voting schemes aim at providing verifiability: voters should trust the result without having to rely on some authorities. Actually, even a prominent voting system like Helios cannot fully achieve verifiability since a dishonest bulletin board may add ballots. This problem is called ballot stuffing.
In this paper we give a definition of verifiability in the computational model to account for a malicious bulletin board that may add ballots. Next, we provide a generic construction that transforms a voting scheme that is verifiable against an honest bulletin board and an honest registration authority (weak verifiability) into a verifiable voting scheme under the weaker trust assumption that the registration authority and the bulletin board are not simultaneously dishonest (strong verifiability). This construction simply adds a registration authority that sends private credentials to the voters, and publishes the corresponding public credentials.
We further provide simple and natural criteria that imply weak verifiability. As an application of these criteria, we formally prove the latest variant of Helios by Bernhard, Pereira and Warinschi weakly verifiable. By applying our generic construction we obtain a Helios-like scheme that has ballot privacy and strong verifiability (and thus prevents ballot stuffing). The resulting voting scheme, Helios-C, retains the simplicity of Helios and has been implemented and tested.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 258865.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Adida, B., de Marneffe, O., Pereira, O., Quisquater, J.J.: Electing a university president using open-audit voting: Analysis of real-world use of Helios. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Electronic Voting Technology/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (2009)
Cramer, R., Gennaro, R., Schoenmakers, B.: A secure and optimally efficient multi-authority election scheme. In: Fumy, W. (ed.) Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1233, pp. 103–118. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Benaloh, J.: Ballot casting assurance via voter-initiated poll station auditing. In: Proceedings of the Second Usenix/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (2007)
International association for cryptologic research, Elections page at http://www.iacr.org/elections/
Cortier, V., Smyth, B.: Attacking and fixing Helios: An analysis of ballot secrecy. In: CSF, pp. 297–311. IEEE Computer Society (2011)
Bernhard, D., Cortier, V., Pereira, O., Smyth, B., Warinschi, B.: Adapting Helios for provable ballot secrecy. In: Atluri, V., Diaz, C. (eds.) ESORICS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6879, pp. 335–354. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Bernhard, D., Pereira, O., Warinschi, B.: How not to prove yourself: Pitfalls of the Fiat-Shamir heuristic and applications to Helios. In: Wang, X., Sako, K. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2012. LNCS, vol. 7658, pp. 626–643. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Juels, A., Catalano, D., Jakobsson, M.: Coercion-resistant electronic elections. In: Chaum, D., Jakobsson, M., Rivest, R.L., Ryan, P.Y.A., Benaloh, J., Kutylowski, M., Adida, B. (eds.) Towards Trustworthy Elections. LNCS, vol. 6000, pp. 37–63. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Adida, B., de Marneffe, O., Pereira, O.: Helios voting system, http://www.heliosvoting.org
Pinault, T., Courtade, P.: E-voting at expatriates’ MPs elections in France. In: Kripp, M.J., Volkamer, M., Grimm, R. (eds.) Electronic Voting. LNI, vol. 205, pp. 189–195. GI (2012)
Camenisch, J., Lysyanskaya, A.: An efficient system for non-transferable anonymous credentials with optional anonymity revocation. In: Pfitzmann, B. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2001. LNCS, vol. 2045, pp. 93–118. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Delaune, S., Kremer, S., Ryan, M.D., Steel, G.: A formal analysis of authentication in the TPM. In: Degano, P., Etalle, S., Guttman, J. (eds.) FAST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6561, pp. 111–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Accountability: definition and relationship to verifiability. In: Al-Shaer, E., Keromytis, A.D., Shmatikov, V. (eds.) ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 526–535. ACM (2010)
Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Verifiability, privacy, and coercion-resistance: New insights from a case study. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 538–553. IEEE Computer Society (2011)
Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Clash attacks on the verifiability of e-voting systems. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 395–409. IEEE Computer Society (2012)
Groth, J.: Evaluating security of voting schemes in the universal composability framework. In: Jakobsson, M., Yung, M., Zhou, J. (eds.) ACNS 2004. LNCS, vol. 3089, pp. 46–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Juels, A., Catalano, D., Jakobsson, M.: Coercion-resistant electronic elections. In: Atluri, V., di Vimercati, S.D.C., Dingledine, R. (eds.) WPES, pp. 61–70. ACM (2005)
Cortier, V., Galindo, D., Glondu, S., Izabachène, M.: Election verifiability for Helios under weaker trust assumptions. HAL - INRIA Archive Ouverte/Open Archive, Research Report RR-8855 (2014), http://hal.inria.fr/hal-01011294
Gamal, T.E.: A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 31(4), 469–472 (1985)
Schnorr, C.P.: Efficient signature generation by smart cards. J. Cryptology 4(3), 161–174 (1991)
Chaum, D., Pedersen, T.P.: Wallet databases with observers. In: Brickell, E.F. (ed.) Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 1992. LNCS, vol. 740, pp. 89–105. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Cramer, R., Damgård, I.B., Schoenmakers, B.: Proofs of partial knowledge and simplified design of witness hiding protocols. In: Desmedt, Y.G. (ed.) Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 1994. LNCS, vol. 839, pp. 174–187. Springer, Heidelberg (1994)
Hazay, C., Lindell, Y.: Efficient Secure Two-Party Protocols - Techniques and Constructions. Information Security and Cryptography. Springer (2010)
Glondu, S.: Helios with Credentials: Proof of concept and mock election results, http://stephane.glondu.net/helios/
Cortier, V., Galindo, D., Glondu, S., Izabachène, M.: Distributed ElGamal à la Pedersen: Application to Helios. In: Sadeghi, A.R., Foresti, S. (eds.) WPES, pp. 131–142. ACM (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cortier, V., Galindo, D., Glondu, S., Izabachène, M. (2014). Election Verifiability for Helios under Weaker Trust Assumptions. In: Kutyłowski, M., Vaidya, J. (eds) Computer Security - ESORICS 2014. ESORICS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8713. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11212-1_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11212-1_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11211-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11212-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)