Abstract
Electronic voting machines promise to determine election results more efficiently without sacrificing reliability. Two desirable security properties seem to contradict each other however: First, the voter’s choice is to be kept secret at all costs, even from election officers who set up and administrate the election machine. On the other hand, ballot secrecy should not compromise the correctness of the tally.
We present a construction that conceals the voter’s choice even from the voting machine while producing a provably-correct tally. Our scheme is an improvement of Bingo Voting [1]. To hide the voter’s choice from the voting machine, we conceive of an electro-mechanical physical oblivious transfer (pOT) device. We further use blind commitments, an extension of cryptographic commitments. Blind commitments can jointly be created by a group of entities, while no single entity is aware of the hidden secret. They can later be unveiled in another multi-party computation.
This work is an extended version of a conference paper [2]. In this version, we work out the details of our construction. Our results corroborate the feasibility of an electronic voting machine that is oblivious to the voters’ choices.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In addition, Damgård and Jurik introduce the parameter s which has an influence on the size of plaintext space and chipertext space. This parameter can be changed without changing the other parameters of the scheme. In this paper we set \(s = 1\).
References
Bohli, J.-M., Müller-Quade, J., Röhrich, S.: Bingo voting: secure and coercion-free voting using a trusted random number generator. In: Alkassar, A., Volkamer, M. (eds.) Vote-ID 2007. LNCS, vol. 4896, pp. 111–124. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-77493-8_10
Achenbach, D., Löwe, B., Müller-Quade, J., Rill, J.: Oblivious voting–hiding votes from the voting machine in bingo voting. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications, SECRYPT, vol. 4, pp. 85–96 (2016)
Chaum, D., Carback, R.T., Clark, J., Essex, A., Popoveniuc, S., Rivest, R.L., Ryan, P.Y., Shen, E., Sherman, A.T., Vora, P.L.: Scantegrity II: end-to-end verifiability by voters of optical scan elections through confirmation codes. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 4, 611–627 (2009)
Feldman, A.J., Halderman, J.A., Felten, E.W.: Security analysis of the diebold accuvote-ts voting machine (2006)
Chaum, D., Carback, R.T., Clark, J., Conway, J., Essex, A., Herrnson, P.S., Mayberry, T., Popoveniuc, S., Rivest, R.L., Shen, E., Sherman, A.T., Vora, P.L.: Scantegrity II municipal election at takoma park: the first E2E binding governmental election with ballot privacy. In: 19th USENIX Security Symposium (2010)
Based, M.A., Tsay, J.-K., Mjølsnes, S.F.: PEVS: a secure electronic voting scheme using polling booths. In: Xiang, Y., Pathan, M., Tao, X., Wang, H. (eds.) ICDKE 2012. LNCS, vol. 7696, pp. 189–205. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34679-8_18
Moran, T., Naor, M.: Split-ballot voting: everlasting privacy with distributed trust. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. (TISSEC) 13, 16 (2010)
Cortier, V., Fuchsbauer, G., Galindo, D.: Beleniosrf: a strongly receipt-free electronic voting scheme. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2015/629 (2015). http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/629
Adida, B.: Helios: web-based open-audit voting. In: USENIX Security Symposium, vol. 17, pp. 335–348 (2008)
Blazy, O., Fuchsbauer, G., Pointcheval, D., Vergnaud, D.: Signatures on randomizable ciphertexts. In: Catalano, D., Fazio, N., Gennaro, R., Nicolosi, A. (eds.) PKC 2011. LNCS, vol. 6571, pp. 403–422. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19379-8_25
Ryan, P.Y.A., Roenne, P.B., Iovino, V.: Selene: voting with transparent verifiability and coercion-mitigation. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2015/1105 (2015). http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1105
Pedersen, T.P.: Non-interactive and information-theoretic secure verifiable secret sharing. In: Feigenbaum, J. (ed.) CRYPTO 1991. LNCS, vol. 576, pp. 129–140. Springer, Heidelberg (1992). doi:10.1007/3-540-46766-1_9
Katz, J.: Universally composable multi-party computation using tamper-proof hardware. In: Naor, M. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2007. LNCS, vol. 4515, pp. 115–128. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-72540-4_7
Moran, T., Segev, G.: David and Goliath commitments: UC computation for asymmetric parties using tamper-proof hardware. In: Smart, N. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2008. LNCS, vol. 4965, pp. 527–544. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78967-3_30
Kilian, J.: Founding crytpography on oblivious transfer. In: Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 20–31. ACM (1988)
Cramer, R., Damgård, I., Nielsen, J.B.: Multiparty computation from threshold homomorphic encryption. In: Pfitzmann, B. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2001. LNCS, vol. 2045, pp. 280–300. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). doi:10.1007/3-540-44987-6_18
Paillier, P.: Public-key cryptosystems based on composite degree residuosity classes. In: Stern, J. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1999. LNCS, vol. 1592, pp. 223–238. Springer, Heidelberg (1999). doi:10.1007/3-540-48910-X_16
Damgård, I., Jurik, M.: A generalisation, a simpli.cation and some applications of paillier’s probabilistic public-key system. In: Kim, K. (ed.) PKC 2001. LNCS, vol. 1992, pp. 119–136. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). doi:10.1007/3-540-44586-2_9
Blum, M.: Coin flipping by telephone a protocol for solving impossible problems. SIGACT News 15, 23–27 (1983)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Achenbach, D., Borcherding, A., Löwe, B., Müller-Quade, J., Rill, J. (2017). Towards Realising Oblivious Voting. In: Obaidat, M. (eds) E-Business and Telecommunications. ICETE 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 764. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67876-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67876-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67875-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67876-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)