Abstract
The cryptographic voting protocol presented in this paper offers public verifiability, everlasting privacy, and coercion-resistance simultaneously. Voters are authenticated anonymously based on perfectly hiding commitments and zero-knowledge proofs. Their vote and participation secrecy is therefore protected independently of computational intractability assumptions or trusted authorities. Coercion-resistance is achieved based on a new mechanism for deniable vote updating. To evade coercion by submitting a final secret vote update, the voter needs not to remember the history of all precedent votes. The protocol uses two types of mix networks to guarantee that vote updating cannot be detected by the coercer. The input sizes and running times of the mix networks are quadratic with respect to the number of submitted ballots.
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Notes
- 1.
We are aware that requiring a secure platform is a strong and probably unrealistic assumption. We do not explicitly address this problem in this paper.
- 2.
Note that \(\gamma _i\not =0\) is a crucial pre-condition to avoid trivial output ciphertexts (1, 1). The verifier of \(\pi _{\mathbf {E}}\) must therefore check \(E_i\not =(1,1)\) for every \(E_i\in \mathbf {E}\) and reject the proof if one of the checks fails.
- 3.
As the computation of the coefficients is quite expensive (\(\frac{1}{2}N^2\) multiplications in \(\mathbb {Z}_p\)), it is performed by the election administration, possibly already during the registration phase in an incremental way. Note that the coefficients can be re-computed and verified by anyone, and voters can efficiently verify the inclusion of their public credential u by checking \(P(u)=0\).
- 4.
The bulletin board could also accept multiple copies of the same ballot, which then need to be eliminated in the tallying phase. But this makes preventing replay and board flooding attacks more complicated.
- 5.
Think of U and V as the indices of the updated and valid votes, respectively.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough reviews and appreciate their comments and suggestions. This research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (project No. 200021L_140650).
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© 2016 International Financial Cryptography Association
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Locher, P., Haenni, R., Koenig, R.E. (2016). Coercion-Resistant Internet Voting with Everlasting Privacy. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9604. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_11
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