Split-ballot voting: everlasting privacy with distributed trust

  • Authors:
  • Tal Moran;Moni Naor

  • Affiliations:
  • Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel;Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a new voting protocol with desirable security properties. The voting stage of the protocol can be performed by humans without computers; it provides every voter with the means to verify that all the votes were counted correctly (universal verifiability) while preserving ballot secrecy. The protocol has "everlasting privacy": even a computationally unbounded adversary gains no information about specific votes from observing the protocol's output. Unlike previous protocols with these properties, this protocol distributes trust between two authorities: a single corrupt authority will not cause voter privacy to be breached. Finally, the protocol is receipt-free: a voter cannot prove how she voted even she wants to do so. We formally prove the security of the protocol in the Universal Composability framework, based on number-theoretic assumptions.