New Techniques for Electronic Voting
Alan Szepieniec, Bart Preneel · 2015
Abstract. This paper presents a novel unifying framework for electronic voting in the universal composability model that includes a property which is new to universal composability but well-known to voting systems: universal verifiability. Additionally, we propose three new techniques for secure electronic voting and prove their security and universal verifiability in the universal composability framework. 1. A tally-hiding voting system, in which the tally that is released consists of only the winner without the vote count. Our proposal builds on a novel solution to the millionaire problem which is of independent interest. 2. A self-tallying vote, in which the tally can be calculated by any observer as soon as the last vote has been cast — but before this happens, no information about the tally is leaked. 3. Authentication of voting credentials, which is a new approach for electronic vot-ing systems based on anonymous credentials. In this approach, the vote authen-ticates the credential so that it cannot afterwards be used for any other purpose but to cast that vote. We propose a practical voting system that instantiates this high-level concept. Note. This is the extended version of the paper with the same title [33], which appeared in the USENIX