Split-ballot voting: Everlasting privacy with distributed trust

  • Authors:
  • Tal Moran;Moni Naor

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

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this article, we propose a new voting protocol with several 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 if she wants to do so. We formally prove the security of the protocol in the universal composability framework, based on number-theoretic assumptions.