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Verified Certificate Checking for Counting Votes

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Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments (VSTTE 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11294))

Abstract

We introduce a new framework for verifying electronic vote counting results that are based on the Single Transferable Vote scheme (STV). Our approach frames electronic vote counting as certified computation where each execution of the counting algorithm is accompanied by a certificate that witnesses the correctness of the output. These certificates are then checked for correctness independently of how they are produced. We advocate verification of the verifier rather than the software used to produce the result. We use the theorem prover HOL4 to formalise the STV vote counting scheme, and obtain a fully verified certificate checker. By connecting HOL4 to the verified CakeML compiler, we then extract an executable that is guaranteed to behave correctly with respect to the formal specification of the protocol down to machine level. We demonstrate that our verifier can check certificates of real-size elections efficiently. Our encoding is modular, so repeating the same process for another different STV scheme would require a minimal amount of additional work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source code of the formalisation can be found at https://github.com/MiladKetabGhale/Checker.

  2. 2.

    Tests were conducted on one core of an Intel Core i7-7500U CPU 2.70 GHz \(\times \) 4 Ubuntu 16.4 LTS.

  3. 3.

    Source code can be found in the Github repository given in the second page.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Milad K. Ghale & Dirk Pattinson

  2. Data61, CSIRO and UNSW, Kensington, Australia

    Ramana Kumar

  3. Data61, CSIRO, and ANU, Canberra, Australia

    Michael Norrish

Authors
  1. Milad K. Ghale
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  2. Dirk Pattinson
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  3. Ramana Kumar
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  4. Michael Norrish
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Milad K. Ghale .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Ruzica Piskac

  2. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Philipp Rümmer

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Ghale, M.K., Pattinson, D., Kumar, R., Norrish, M. (2018). Verified Certificate Checking for Counting Votes. In: Piskac, R., Rümmer, P. (eds) Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments. VSTTE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11294. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03592-1

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