Protecting the Privacy of Voters: New Definitions of Ballot Secrecy for E-Voting

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Protecting the privacy of voters is a basic requirement of any electronic voting scheme, and formal definitions can be used to prove that a scheme satisfies privacy. In this work, we provide new game-based definitions of ballot secrecy for electronic voting schemes. First, we propose an intuitive definition in the honest model, i.e., a model in which all election officials are honest. Then, we show that this definition can be easily extended to the malicious ballot box setting and a setting that allows for a distributed tallier. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first game-based definition of ballot secrecy that models both a malicious ballot box and a malicious subset of talliers. We demonstrate that our definitions of ballot secrecy are satisfiable, defining electronic voting scheme constructions which we prove satisfy our definitions. Finally, we revisit existing definitions, exploring their limitations and contextualising our contributions to the field.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSelected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) 2020
PublisherSpringer, [Cham]
Pages670-697
Number of pages18
Volume12804
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-030-81652-0
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-81651-3
Publication statusPublished - 21 Jul 2021
EventSelected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) 2020 -
Duration: 21 Oct 202023 Oct 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer

Conference

ConferenceSelected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) 2020
Period21/10/2023/10/20

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