NetVote: A Strict-Coercion Resistance Re-Voting Based Internet Voting Scheme with Linear Filtering

Iñigo Querejeta-Azurmendi, David Arroyo Guardeño, Jorge L. Hernández-Ardieta and Luis Hernández Encinas
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Iñigo Querejeta-Azurmendi: Departamento de Informática, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés, Spain
David Arroyo Guardeño: Instituto de Tecnologías Físicas y de la Información (ITEFI), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), 28006 Madrid, Spain
Jorge L. Hernández-Ardieta: Departamento de Informática, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés, Spain
Luis Hernández Encinas: Instituto de Tecnologías Físicas y de la Información (ITEFI), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), 28006 Madrid, Spain

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-29

Abstract: This paper proposes NetVote, an internet voting protocol where usability and ease in deployment are a priority. We introduce the notion of strict coercion resistance, to distinguish between vote-buying and coercion resistance. We propose a protocol with ballot secrecy, practical everlasting privacy, verifiability and strict coercion resistance in the re-voting setting. Coercion is mitigated via a random dummy vote padding strategy to hide voting patterns and make re-voting deniable. This allows us to build a filtering phase with linear complexity, based on zero knowledge proofs to ensure correctness while maintaining privacy of the process. Voting tokens are formed by anonymous credentials and pseudorandom identifiers, achieving practical everlasting privacy, where even if dealing with a future computationally unbounded adversary, vote intention is still hidden. It is not assumed for voters to own cryptographic keys prior to the election, nor store cryptographic material during the election. This property allows voters not only to vote multiple times, but also from different devices each time, granting the voter a vote-from-anywhere experience. This paper builds on top of the paper published in CISIS’19. In this version, we modify the filtering. Moreover, we formally define the padding technique, which allows us to perform the linear filtering scheme. Similarly we provide more details on the protocol itself and include a section of the security analysis, where we include the formal definitions of strict coercion resistance and a game based definition of practical everlasting privacy. Finally, we prove that NetVote satisfies them all.

Keywords: internet voting; coercion-resistance; data privacy; zero knowledge; homomorphic encryption; usability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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