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Selene: Voting with Transparent Verifiability and Coercion-Mitigation

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9604))

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Abstract

End-to-end verifiable voting schemes typically involve voters handling an encrypted ballot in order to confirm that their vote is accurately included in the tally. While this may be technically valid, from a public acceptance standpoint it may be problematic: many voters may not really understand the purpose of the encrypted ballot and the various checks that they can perform. In this paper we take a different approach and revisit an old idea: to provide each voter with a private tracking number. Votes are posted on a bulletin board in the clear along with their associated tracking number. This is appealing in that it provides voters with a very simple, intuitive way to verify their vote, in the clear. However, there are obvious drawbacks: we must ensure that no two voters are assigned the same tracker and we need to keep the link between voters and trackers private.

We propose a scheme that addresses both of these problems: we ensure that voters get unique trackers and we close off coercion opportunities by ensuring that the voters only learn their tracking numbers after the votes have been posted. The resulting scheme provides receipt-freeness, and indeed a good level of coercion-resistance while also providing a more immediately understandable form of verifiability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As Bernhard et al. [5] showed, it is possible to tweak the so called Enc+PoK paradigm (where one adds a proof of knowledge to an ElGamal ciphertext) to achieve non-malleable encryption that is sufficient for ballot independence. Another possibility is to resort to threshold Cramer and Shoup [28]. Note that any change will be completely transparent in Selene where the vote cast system can be essentially arbitrary.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sunoo Park, Bill Roscoe, Mark Ryan and Richard Stallman for interesting discussions and suggestions. Further, Vincenzo Iovino is supported by the National Research Fund, Luxembourg, and Peter B. Rønne is supported by the ANR/FNR project Sequoia ANR-14-CE28-0030-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter Y. A. Ryan, Peter B. Rønne & Vincenzo Iovino

  2. INRIA Nancy, Villers-làs-Nancy, France

    Peter B. Rønne

Authors
  1. Peter Y. A. Ryan
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  2. Peter B. Rønne
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  3. Vincenzo Iovino
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Correspondence to Peter Y. A. Ryan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  2. University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Sarah Meiklejohn

  3. Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Peter Y.A. Ryan

  4. Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

    Dan Wallach

  5. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Michael Brenner

  6. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Kurt Rohloff

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© 2016 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Ryan, P.Y.A., Rønne, P.B., Iovino, V. (2016). Selene: Voting with Transparent Verifiability and Coercion-Mitigation. 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_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_12

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