Penn CIS 400 - Surveying and Improving Electronic Voting Schemes

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Surveying and Improving Electronic Voting SchemesJonathan GouletJeffrey ZitelliAdvisor: Dr. Sampath KannanAbstract:While recent controversies concerning the weaknesses of current voting machineshave drawn some interest to methods of online voting, as well as other votingtechnologies, the possibility of holding large scale public elections online is only one ofthe motivations for studying the subject. In addition to being a candidate technology foruse in elections, the problems associated with online voting provide a field on which toexplore cryptographic theory. We approach the task of designing and implementing anonline voting protocol with both of these motivations in mind.Various schemes for conducting online elections have been proposed bycryptography researchers since the 1980s. These proposals have attempted to maintainthe desired features of a “traditional” election in a domain where votes are submittedelectronically over some public network, such as the Internet, while also seeking toexpose unique advantages of online voting over other methods. We have provided anexamination of these existing protocols and identified the strengths and weaknesses ofeach under different election premises. In the process of doing so, we have gained anunderstanding of the cryptographic techniques employed in these systems, and also someinsights that have allowed us to make improvements to existing protocols and exploreways of making them more secure and efficient.We have constructed an implementation of an online voting system using anadaptation of an already existing protocol. This system is comprised of an interface forconducting elections as well as a voting protocol that incorporates cryptographic methodsto prevent many attacks involving adversaries that may eavesdrop or create messages, orcorrupt election participants; however, security issues that are not addressed in otherelectronic voting protocols (such as denial of service attacks or untrustedsoftware/hardware) were considered beyond the scope of our project. We plan todemonstrate the functionality and security of our voting system by designing a simulationof an election scenario.Related Work:There have been many systems proposed to solve the problem of holding localand national elections through an online system. These systems begin with the goal ofimplementing voting processes that employ the accessibility of the Internet, in hopes ofincreasing voter turnout and making it easier for citizens to vote, while at the same timemaintaining the safety and security that are necessary for elections in a democratic nation.Many have begun by outlining the various features that must be present in a free and fairelection, and those that are present in the current voting system used in the United States.For example, Karro and Wang require that the following criteria be met for an onlinevoting system to be “secure and practical for large-scale elections”: “Democracy”,“Accuracy”, “Privacy”, “Verifiability”, “Simplicity”, “Mobility”, “Efficiency”,“Scalability”, and “Responsibility” [1]. Many other proposals outline a similar list ofrequired features. For example, the protocol proposed by Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta [3]also describes “Soundness,” “Eligibility,” and “Fairness” as desired properties of a goodelection scheme. More recently, schemes such as that of Juels and Jakobsson [4] alsopoint out that “Receipt-Freeness” and, more generally, “Coercion Resistance” arenecessary properties in order to avoid the occurrence of voter coercion or of vote buyingto violate the election. The existing systems use various forms of cryptographic andsecurity protocols to ensure that these criteria are met in their implementation of an onlineelection system. Many of the existing systems begin by breaking the voting process up intomultiple phases, and also partitioning the responsibilities for these steps among variousdifferent components. For example, the system developed by Cranor and Cytron, breaksthe process up among four components: the “Registrar,” “Pollster,” “Validator,” and“Tallier” [2]. In this scheme, the Registrar is “responsible for registering voters prior toan election or poll.” The Pollster then acts during the actual election to send “humanreadable ballots to a voter, collecting the voter’s responses,” and perform “cryptographicfunction on the voter’s behalf,” among other features. The Validator verifies that a voteris registered and ensures “that only one vote is cast by each registered voter.” Finally, theTallier has the function of “collecting the voted ballots and tallying the results of theelection or survey” [2]. The system implements various cryptographic protocols for thecommunication between these components and the voters’ machines to ensure thesecurity of the system and the satisfaction of the given criterion. This system is basedclosely on that proposed by Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta [3]. The system proposed byKarro and Wang [1] not only breaks the process up into different components, but alsodescribes in detail different phases of the online voting scheme. This process uses sixcomponents, or “central facilities,” in the voting scheme: “the registrar, the authenticator,the distributor, the counter, the matcher, and the verifier” [1]. In addition, the protocolconsists of four different phases: the “Registration phase”, “Pre-Voting phase”, “Votingphase”, and “Announcement phase” [1]. Again, this protocol uses various cryptographicprocedures and encryption/decryption methods to ensure that the vote is administeredfairly and no fixing or changing of votes can take place.In achieving these criteria, most of the schemes utilize a set of cryptographicprimitives to develop their election protocol and make it secure. These primitives includepublic-key cryptosystems, bit-commitment schemes, homomorphic encryptions, and mix-nets. These primitives allow the protocols to ensure the security of the informationexchanged and the accuracy, privacy, and fairness that are necessary in a good electionscheme. A more detailed description of these primitives and how they are used in somerepresentative existing protocols is presented in our report entitled “A Survey ofElectronic Voting Schemes,” which we submitted as the result of our first semester work.In this report, we have looked at a


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