Cryptographic Voting Protocols: A short Overwiev
Bjorn Breitmeyer · 2008
Cryptographic voting systems are trying to ensure privacy, security and veriability to the electronic voting systems. They try to guarantee these traits independent of the used software. As those protocols rely on another set of hardware, the hole system needs to be evaluated. In this paper i will discuss the schemes of Andrew Ne and David Chaum based on the paper from Karlof, Sastry and Wagner [2]. It also contains a small motivation why the DRE systems are not sucient and alternatives like cryptographic voting protocols are needed. Several weaknesses have been discovered in the analysis, most of them hard to solve. They are all induced by the underspecication of the protocols, as they have not described how the most vital parts of the protocols should be implemented, they are just described as black boxes. Karlof has hopes for the voting protocols if they specify the rest of the system, even though he does not propose the use already. In contrast to them, i highly doubt they will be capable reaching their goal of becoming a secure, software independent system. With new specications, new problems will occur and all proposes of Karlof induced new weaknesses or a rollback to the paper based system. So in my opinion cryptographic voting protocols were aiming for a good but kind of unreachable target and there has to be found a way to trust at least one vital part of an election to ensure security for the hole election.