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Enabling Vote Delegation for Boardroom Voting

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10323))

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Abstract

A lot of decisions are made during boardroom meetings. After a discussion, the head of the board often asks for a quick poll. But what if you cannot join the meeting? So called boardroom voting schemes have been proposed to conduct the poll over the Internet and thereby enabling also those who are not present but available online to participant in the poll. But what if you are not available at this point in time? For important decisions you may want to delegate your vote to a present and trusted board member. In this paper, we show how to extend an existing boardroom voting scheme towards delegation functionality. The new scheme is evaluated against security requirements determined for boardroom voting and security requirements tailored to the delegation process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As opposed to [20], similar to the proposal in [5] we consider verifiability to be a part of integrity, and not a separate requirement. We furthermore consider uniqueness a part of eligibility.

  2. 2.

    We refer to a voter or a proxy as honest if she behaves according to the scheme specification.

  3. 3.

    Note, that the relevancy of this requirement might be debated, since in some cases it is reasonable to assume, that other boardroom members know whom the delegating voter trusts anyway. Still, we choose to include this requirement for the case, when the voter does not wish to publicly disclose his support for a particular proxy to others, or even to the proxy herself.

  4. 4.

    While there are extensions of [26] that ensure verifiability to protect against dishonest dealers (e.g. [24]), this protection is not required in our scheme, since the dealer has no incentive to cheat during secret sharing. Hence, for the sake of simplicity we chose to use a less complex variant.

  5. 5.

    Note that as this PKI can used independently of any specific election, it can be prepared well in advance and reused subsequently.

  6. 6.

    This list, for example, could be a list of board members who have a right to participate in the meeting.

  7. 7.

    Note, that these assumptions are common within e-voting systems, e.g. Helios [1].

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Acknowledgements

This paper has been partially developed within the project (HA project no. 435/14-25) funded in the framework of Hessen ModellProjekte, financed with funds of LOEWE –Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz, Förderlinie 3: KMU-Verbundvorhaben (State Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence). It has also been partially developed within the project ‘VALID’ - Verifiable Liquid Democracy - which is funded by the Polyas GmbH. This work has also been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well as by the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts within CRISP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Oksana Kulyk, Stephan Neumann, Karola Marky & Melanie Volkamer

  2. Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Melanie Volkamer

Authors
  1. Oksana Kulyk
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  2. Stephan Neumann
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  3. Karola Marky
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  4. Melanie Volkamer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oksana Kulyk .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Michael Brenner

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

    Kurt Rohloff

  3. New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Joseph Bonneau

  4. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Andrew Miller

  5. University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Peter Y.A. Ryan

  6. University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Vanessa Teague

  7. University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

    Andrea Bracciali

  8. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

  9. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Federico Pintore

  10. Agari Inc., San Mateo, California, USA

    Markus Jakobsson

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Kulyk, O., Neumann, S., Marky, K., Volkamer, M. (2017). Enabling Vote Delegation for Boardroom Voting. In: Brenner, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10323. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_26

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