Blockchain, consensus, and cryptography in electronic voting


Keywords:
cryptographic voting blockchain electronic voting trust consensus
Panagiotis Grontas
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7584-0643
Aris Pagourtzis
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6220-3722
Abstract

Motivated by the recent trends to conduct electronic elections using blockchain technologies, we review the vast literature on cryptographic voting and assess the status of the field. We analyze the security requirements for voting systems and describe the major ideas behind the most influential cryptographic protocols for electronic voting. We focus on the great importance of consensus in the elimination of trusted third parties. Finally, we examine whether recent blockchain innovations can satisfy the strict requirements set for the security of electronic voting.

Article Details
  • Section
  • Articles
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
References
Adida, B. (2006). Advances in cryptographic voting systems. (Thesis (Ph. D.)). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Adida, B. (2008). Helios: web-based open-audit voting. In Proceedings of the 17th conference on Security symposium (pp. 335-348). USENIX Association. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1496711.1496734
Adida, B. (2019). Convincing the loser: Securing elections against modern threats. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy0_8A9U8Rs
Alvarez, R. M., & Hall, T. E. (2010). Electronic elections: The perils and promises of digital democracy. Princeton University Press.
Baudron, O., Fouque, P.-A., Pointcheval, D., Stern, J., & Poupard, G. (2001). Practical multi-candidate election system. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (pp. 274-283). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/383962.384044
Benaloh, J. (2006). Simple Verifiable Elections. In EVT’06.
Benaloh, J. (2008). Administrative and public verifiability: Can we have both? In Proceedings of the Conference on Electronic Voting Technology (p. 5:1-5:10). USENIX Association. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1496739.1496744
Benaloh, J., & Tuinstra, D. (1994). Receipt-free secret-ballot elections (extended abstract). In Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing - STOC ’94 (pp. 544-553). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
Chaum, D. (1981). Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 24 (2), 84-88.
Chaum, D. (1982). Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In D. Chaum, R. L. Rivest, & A. T. Sherman (Eds.), Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0602-4_18
Chaum, D. (2001). SureVote: Technical Overview. In Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (WOTE ’01).
Chaum, D. (2004). Secret-ballot receipts: True voter-verifiable elections. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 2(1), 38-47.
Clarke, D., & Martens, T. (2016). E-Voting in Estonia. In Real-World Electronic Voting: Design, Analysis and Deployment. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315371290
Clarkson, M. R., Chong, S., & Myers, A. C. (2008). Civitas: Toward a secure voting system. In IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium. Retrieved from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/sp/sp2008.html#ClarksonCM08
Cohen, J. D., & Fischer, M. J. (1985). A robust and verifiable cryptographically secure election scheme (Extended Abstract). In FOCS (pp. 372-382).
Cortier, V., Galindo, D., Kusters, R., Muller, J., & Truderung, T. (2016). SoK: Verifiability notions for e-voting protocols. In IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium (pp. 779-798).
Cramer, R., Gennaro, R., & Schoenmakers, B. (1997). A secure and optimally efficient multi-authority election scheme. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 103-118.
Culnane, C., & Schneider, S. (2014). A peered bulletin board for robust use in verifiable voting systems. In 2014 IEEE 27th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (pp. 169-183). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2014.20
Diffie, W., & Hellman, M. E. (1976). New directions in cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 22(6), 644-654. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638
Dricot, L., & Pereira, O. (2018). SoK: Uncentralisable ledgers and their impact on voting systems. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08064
Elgamal, T. (1985). A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 31(4), 469–472. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1985.1057074
Fiat, A., & Shamir, A. (1986). How to prove yourself: Practical solutions to identification and signature problems. In A. M. Odlyzko (Ed.) (Vol. 263, pp. 186-194). Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47721-7_12
Fujioka, A., Okamoto, T., & Ohta, K. A. (1992). Practical secret voting scheme for large scale elections. (J. Seberry & Y. Zheng, Eds.), 718
Advances in Cryptology - AUSCRYPT ’92, Workshop on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, December 13-16, 1992, Proceedings § (1992). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57220-1_66
Furukawa, J., & Sako, K. (2001). An efficient scheme for proving a shuffle. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology (pp. 368-387). London, UK: Springer-Verlag.
Garay, J., Kiayias, A., & Leonardos, N. (2015). The bitcoin backbone protocol: Analysis and applications. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46803-6 10
Gencer, A. E. (2018). Decentralization in bitcoin and Ethereum networks. CoRR, abs/1801.0. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03998
Goldreich, O. (2010). Foundations of cryptography. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511721656
Goldwasser, S., & Micali, S. (1984). Probabilistic encryption. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0000(84)90070-9
Goldwasser, S., Micali, S., & Rackoff, C. (1985). The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems. SIAM Journal on Computing, 18 (1), 186-208. https://doi.org/10.1137/0218012
Grontas, P., Pagourtzis, A., & Zacharakis, A. (2017). Coercion resistance in a practical secret voting scheme for large scale elections. In Proceedings - 14th International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms and Networks, I-SPAN 2017, 11th International Conference on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology, FCST 2017 and 3rd International Symposium of Creative Computing, ISCC 2017 (Vol. 2017–Novem, pp. 514-519). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPAN-FCST-ISCC.2017.79
Grontas, P., Pagourtzis, A., Zacharakis, A., & Zhang, B. (2019). Towards everlasting privacy and efficient coercion resistance in remote electronic voting. In A. Zohar, I. Eyal, V. Teague, J. Clark, A. Bracciali, F. Sala, & P. Massimiliano (Eds.), Financial cryptography and data security (FC 2018). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10958 (pp. 210-231). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_15
Halderman, J. A. (2012). Securing digital democracy. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/course/digitaldemocracy
Halderman, J. A. (2016). Practical attacks on real-world e-voting. In Real-World electronic voting: Design, analysis and deployment. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315371290
Heiberg, S. (2018). On trade-offs of applying block chains for electronic voting bulletin boards. IACR Cryptology EPrint Archive, 2018, 685. Retrieved from https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/685
Jakobsson, M., Juels, A., & Rivest, R. L. (2002). Making mix nets robust for electronic voting by randomized partial checking. In In USENIX Security Symposium (pp. 339-353).
Juels, A., Catalano, D., & Jakobsson, M. (2005). Coercion-resistant electronic elections. In V. Atluri, S. D. C. di Vimercati, & R. Dingledine (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 6000 LNCS, pp. 37-63). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12980-3_2
Kiayias, A., Kuldmaa, A., Lipmaa, H., Siim, J., & Zacharias, T. (2018). On the security properties of e-voting bulletin boards (pp. 505-523). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98113-0_27
Kiayias, A., & Yung, M. (2002). Self-tallying elections and perfect ballot secrecy. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45664-3_10
Kiayias, A., Zacharias, T., & Zhang, B. (2015). End-to-end verifiable elections in the standard model. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 9057, pp. 468–498). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46803-6_16
Kilian, J., & Sako, K. (1995). Receipt-Free {MIX}-Type voting scheme - A practical solution to the implementation of a voting booth. In Proceedings of {EUROCRYPT} 1995. Springer-Verlag.
Kusters, R., Truderung, T., & Vogt, A. (2010). Accountability: definition and relationship to verifiability. Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. https://doi.org/10.1145/1866307.1866366
Lamport, L., Shostak, R., & Pease, M. (1982). The Byzantine Generals Problem. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 4 (3), 382-401. https://doi.org/10.1145/357172.357176
Lewis, S. J., Pereira, O., & Teague, V. (2019). Ceci n’est pas une preuve. Retrieved from https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/vjteague/UniversalVerifiabilitySwissPost.pdf
McCorry, P., Shahandashti, S. F., & Hao, F. (2017). A smart contract for boardroom voting with maximum voter privacy. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_20
Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G. M., & Savage, S. (2013). A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In IMC ’13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference. https://doi.org/10.1145/2504730.2504747
Moran, T., & Naor, M. (2006). Receipt-Free universally-verifiable voting with everlasting privacy (pp. 373-392). https://doi.org/10.1007/11818175_22
Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9062-0
Nasser, Y., Okoye, C., Clark, J., & Ryan, P. Y. A. (2018). Blockchains and voting: Somewhere between hype and a panacea. Retrieved from https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/papers/draft_voting.pdf
Neff, C. A. (2004). Verifiable Mixing (Shuffling) of ElGamal Pairs. Retrieved from http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.897/spring04/Neff-2004-04-21-ElGamalShuffles.pdf
Panja, S. (2018). A secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain. IACR Cryptology EPrint Archive, 2018, 466. Retrieved from https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466
Park, C., Itoh, K., & Kurosawa, K. (1993). Efficient anonymous channel and All/Nothing election scheme. In EUROCRYPT (pp. 248-259). https://doi.org/http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/bibs/0765/07650248.htm
Patuit, E. (2011). Voting methods. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/
Rivest, R. L. (2008). On the notion of ‘software independence’ in voting systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 366 (1881), 3759-3767.
Russell Michaels, S. A. (2006). Hacking democracy. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZLWPleeCHE
Schneier, B. (2018). Securing elections. Retrieved from https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html
Shamir, A. (1979). How to share a secret. Communications of the ACM, 22 (11), 612-613. https://doi.org/10.1145/359168.359176
Simons, B., & Jones, D. W. (2012). Internet voting in the U.S. Communications of the ACM, 55 (10), 68-77.
Wolchok, S., Wustrow, E., Isabel, D., & Halderman, J. A. (2012). Attacking the Washington, D.C. internet voting system. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32946-3_10
Wood, G. (2014). Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
Yu, B., Liu, J. K., Sakzad, A., Nepal, S., Steinfeld, R., Rimba, P., & Au, M. H. (2018). Platform-independent secure blockchain-based voting system (pp. 369-386). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99136-8_20
Zacharakis, A., Grontas, P., & Pagourtzis, A. (2017). Conditional blind signatures. Short Version Presented in 7th International Conference on Algebraic Informatics - CAI 2017, 2017, 682. Retrieved from http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/682