# Tag Info

48

In the Swiss Post electronic voting protocol, after voters submit ballots, they are scrambled individually and shuffled together so that they cannot be traced back to voters to find who voted for whom—variously called ballot secrecy, privacy, or anonymity—before they are tallied. But since the ballots are bits in an electronic system, not physical artifacts,...

17

Elgamal can be made additive by encrypting $g^m$ instead of $m$ with traditional Elgamal for some generator $g$ (usually the same one used to generate the public key). This variant is sometimes called exponential Elgamal. The difficulty is decryption: running the standard decryption gives you $g^m$ and recovering $m$ requires you to solve the discrete log. ...

16

The problem was the poor design of the scheme, specifically the part for universal verifiability. As the paper Ceci n’est pas une preuve states: To guarantee anonymity of the votes the scheme makes use of mixnets which rely on the shuffle proof by Bayer and Groth (a generalisation of Pedersen commitments), which then further relies on the discrete ...

11

In short, my answer is no; keep paper ballot, their have essential virtues unmatched by electronic substitutes; in particular, giving voters confidence that the result of the vote is not grossly manipulated. Full disclosure: I co-founded a (French) association towards citizen oversight of voting means, essentially opposing electronic voting for political ...

10

We can't make satisfactory Electronic Voting Machines. Their design face conflicting goals that are impossible to reconcile, even in the simplest conceivable use case: a yes/no vote, a single machine. Count votes (or at least: determine if there was more yes than no) with the result public. Limit voting to one per registered voter. Keep individual votes ...

8

Using exponential Elgamal as the encryption function, Define the list of candidates: e.g., Alice, Bob, Carol Voters submit an encryption of their vote: e.g., to voter for Alice: $v=\langle\mathsf{Enc}(1),\mathsf{Enc}(0),\mathsf{Enc}(0)\rangle$ Use an OR-proof (Fig 2) to show each ciphertext encrypts a 0 or a 1: e.g., $\langle \pi_1, \pi_2, \pi_3 \rangle$ ...

7

Full disclosure: In 2007 I founded an association aiming at voting transparency. I'm proud that my efforts may have had some role, however small, in the fact that the number of French cities using electronic voting machines for political elections, then growing, has been declining since then. The book defining the protocol of the question is made freely ...

7

Yes. There has been extensive research on this question: there is even a community of cryptographers who work on building voting schemes of this sort (see end-to-end auditable voting system). I'll give you some advice based upon the experience from that field. Don't design your own. Don't try to design your own. There has been extensive research into ...

7

Notice that the result says 67 mod 257. All calculations here are being done modulo 257. So, $101^{-1}$ is actually the modular inverse of $101 \bmod 257$, which is 28. Similarly, $85 \cdot 28$ is also done modulo 257.

7

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is yes. You have made glaring mistakes. In particular, Yao's garbled circuits are suited for two-party computation only, and here you wish to carry out a multiparty computation. One huge problem that arises with your entire approach is that if the server colludes with one of the voters, then they can learn the ...

5

How does an average voter know that his vote actually counted? He doesn't have any way of performing the summation and obtaining the private key to decrypt. This is not actually true. He does have a way of performing the summation. From the spec, "all captured votes are displayed (in encrypted form) for all to see". Given the encrypted votes, you can do the ...

5

Electronic voting schemes constitute a big area of cryptographic research. The problem is complicated and multifaceted, and there are still no end-to-end secure schemes that provide desirable properties like verifiability and coercion resistance and that have good usability and performance for a large number of voters. See for example this survey from 2017 ...

5

A threshold, additively homomorphic cryptosystems (such as the threshold variant of paillier) would work just fine for this sort of system. Each voter would need to prove that their vote was in the set $\{-1,0,1\}$ instead of the typical $\{0,1\}$. All of this could be done using the thep library. There is a page on dealing with negative numbers. An ...

5

There is a very recent paper that solves this problem at a large scale using secure computation techniques: How to (not) share a password: Privacy preserving protocols for finding heavy hitters with adversarial behavior: Moni Naor, Benny Pinkas, Eyal Ronen They motivate the problem from the point of view of passwords (they want to identify passwords that ...

4

I am making the following assumptions regarding your requirements: The number of participants is low enough, for it to be feasible for each participant to open a reliable, authenticated and confidential communication channel to each other participant. The vote of each individual participant is only meant to be kept secret until the threshold of votes has ...

4

Unfortunately, most of the reasons that e-voting is not popular have nothing to do with the integrity of the underlying mathematics. This makes the question slight moot on a cryptography forum, but the following un-cryptographic answer still entirely relevant. Unless you solve the following (non exhaustive) problems:- It's a requirement of law ...

4

After a small search; it is a vote buying scheme. Chain voting, a vote buying scheme in which a crook gives the voter a pre-voted ballot, the voter votes that ballot, and then after leaving the polling place, sells his blank ballot to the crook, who votes it and then gives it to the next willing participant. This is from Douglas W. Jones web page and ...

3

You shouldn't use advanced crypto nor specialist algorithms here else you will be seriously over engineering and actually increasing the risks you face not reducing them. Seasoned security engineers would strongly recommend the "KISS principle". It's better to do something simple with a low error rate than attempt something complex and maybe have a bug ...

3

The second property is formally called receipt freeness. Any voting system based on probabilistic encryption cannot be receipt free, because the voter uses a random value to construct the vote, this random value can serve as a receipt. The solution given to this problem is by having an authority create the vote and the voter simply selects it from a ...

3

Andrew Neff's verifiable shuffle scheme A Verifiable Secret Shuffle and its Application to E-Voting is implemented by the DeDiS Advanced Crypto Library for Go A working example program that uses the code is the server from the Riffle anonymous communication system. Here's a "mostly finished" standalone implementation in Go, including a paper explaining the ...

3

Encryption based voting will always suffer for a different reason. As a human, I cannot look at a numeric token to know if the value is "Yes" or "No". I have to 100% trust that the voting system is telling me this number is a vote for my candidate or not. It doesn't matter if there's a solidly convincing mathematical proof. As an ordinary voter, I ...

3

You can use blind signatures: "Blind signatures can also be used to provide unlinkability, which prevents the signer from linking the blinded message it signs to a later un-blinded version that it may be called upon to verify. In this case, the signer's response is first "un-blinded" prior to verification in such a way that the signature remains valid for ...

2

Something along these lines could be accomplished with zero-knowledge proofs. The voter proves that each one of the ballots is in the set $\{0,1\}$ and that the sum of the ballots is $1$. Prove this to each of the $n$ trusted third parties. Each of the third parties signs the ballots once the proof is done. Then the voter casts the ballots. Signatures can ...

2

It seems you want to decrypt the final value without revealing the private key. First, if someone knows the private key, they can issue a very simple non-interactive zero knowledge proof that the plaintext is a decryption of the ciphertext (the ciphertext being the accumulation of all the ballots) without revealing the actual value of the key. This is the ...

2

Just to say you have tons of literature about that. If you need an entry point check out some papers here for instance: http://esorics2014.pwr.wroc.pl/page2/index.html#15 Read the introductions and the related work and follow the links to find the big seminal papers in the domain. Oh also, just a remark: it seems that you are looking for anonymity. if ...

2

It can guarantee the integrity, because you can not fake another voting with the same hash. However, this only shows the ballot is casted correctly, but does not prove the ballot is correctly counted. And as you said, it can not provide anonymity, such as buying vote and coercion.

2

A homomorphic cryptosystem has some operation $*$ on ciphertexts that correspond to some other operation $\circ$ on plaintexts, that is $$\mathcal{D}(c_1 * c_2) = \mathcal{D}(c_1) \circ \mathcal{D}(c_2).$$ Typically, the ciphertexts you get by applying $*$ look like ciphertexts that are produced by the encryption algorithm. For Damgård-Jurik, $*$ is ...

2

The easiest way would be to make use of a trusted third party. In this way, users can authenticate to the trusted party (maybe with the cellphone/IMEI number) which then issues them with a "ticket" or "group/blind signature" along with a pseudo-identity, similar to those used in e-voting schemes. The pseudo-identities can then be checked for duplicates. ...

2

Yes, it could be done. However, it would work a little different from what you imagine. The government can create a new blockchain operating under zerocoin rules. The government could then distribute one satoshi per citizen. This distribution could happen for example by letting each citizen visit a government office to present their passport and receive ...

2

I thought that the structure of the presentation would be as followed. One of the basic tools that are used by the most cryptographic protocols of electronic voting are the Zero-Knowledge proofs. These proofs use protocols at which the Prover confirms to a Verifier the correctness of a statement, in such a way that the Verifier cannot find anything out ...

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