research-article

vVote: A Verifiable Voting System

Authors:

Peter Y. A. Ryan,

Steve Schneider,

Vanessa TeagueAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 18, Issue 1

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/2746338

Published: 09 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The Prêt à Voter cryptographic voting system was designed to be flexible and to offer voters a familiar and easy voting experience. In this article, we present our development of the Prêt à Voter design to a practical implementation used in a real state election in November 2014, called vVote. As well as solving practical engineering challenges, we have also had to tailor the system to the idiosyncrasies of elections in the Australian state of Victoria and the requirements of the Victorian Electoral Commission. This article includes general background, user experience, and details of the cryptographic protocols and human processes. We explain the problems, present solutions, then analyze their security properties and explain how they tie in to other design decisions.

References

[1]

Susan Bell, Josh Benaloh, Michael D. Byrne, Dana DeBeauvoir, Bryce Eakin, Gail Fisher, Philip Kortum, Neal McBurnett, Julian Montoya, Michelle Parker, Olivier Pereira, Philip B. Stark, Dan S. Wallach, and Michael Winn. 2013. STAR-Vote: A secure, transparent, auditable, and reliable voting star-vote: A secure, transparent, auditable, and reliable voting system. USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems (JETS) 1, 1 (August 2013).

[2]

Jonathan Ben-Nun, Niko Fahri, Morgan Llewellyn, Ben Riva, Alon Rosen, Amnon Ta-Shma, and Douglas Wikström. 2012. A new implementation of a dual (paper and cryptographic) voting system. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Electronic Voting (EVOTE’12).

[3]

Josh Benaloh. 2006. Simple verifiable elections. In Proceedings of the 1st USENIXAccurate Electronic Voting Technology Workshop.

Digital Library

[4]

Josh Benaloh and Eric Lazarus. 2011. The Trash Attack: An Attack on Verifiable Voting Systems and a Simple Mitigation. Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-115. Microsoft.

[5]

Josh Benaloh, Tal Moran, Lee Naish, Kim Ramchen, and Vanessa Teague. 2009. Shuffle-sum: Coercion-resistant verifiable tallying for STV voting. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 4, 4 (2009), 685--698.

Digital Library

[6]

Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan, Vanessa Teague, Roland Wen, and Zhe Xia. 2012b. Using Prêt à Voter in Victorian State elections. In Proceedings of the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections.

Digital Library

[7]

Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Thea Peacock, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan, and Zhe Xia. 2012a. A supervised verifiable voting protocol for the Victorian Electoral Commission. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Electronic Voting.

[8]

Richard Carback, David Chaum, Jeremy Clark, John Conway, Aleksander Essex, Paul S. Herrnson, Travis Mayberry, Stefan Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Emily Shen, Alan T. Sherman, and Poorvi L. Vora. 2010. Scantegrity II municipal election at Takoma Park: The first E2E binding governmental election with ballot privacy. In Proceedings of USENIX Security.

Digital Library

[9]

David Chaum, Benjamin Hosp, Stefan Popoveniuc, and Poorvi L. Vora. 2009. Accessible voter-verifiability. Cryptologia 33, 3 (2009), 283--291.

Digital Library

[10]

Chris Culnane, James Heather, Rui Joaquim, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider, and Vanessa Teague. 2013. Faster print on demand for Prêt à Voter. USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems 2, 1 (2013).

[11]

Chris Culnane and Steve Schneider. 2014. A peered bulletin board for robust use in verifiable voting systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium.

Digital Library

[12]

Chris Culnane, Steve Schneider, Peter Y. A. Ryan, and Vanessa Teague. 2014. vVote: A verifiable voting system. ArXiV eprint: arXiv:1404.6822.

[13]

Roberto Di Cosmo. 2007. On Privacy and Anonymity in Electronic and Non Electronic Voting: The Ballot-as-Signature Attack. Retrieved from http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00142440/en/.

[14]

Jun Furukawa and Kazue Sako. 2001. An efficient scheme for proving a shuffle. In Proceedings of CRYPTO 2001. Springer, 368--387.

Digital Library

[15]

Marcin Gogolewski, Marek Klonowski, Przemyslaw Kubiak, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Anna Lauks, and Filip Zagórski. 2006. Kleptographic attacks on e-voting schemes. In Proceedigns of the International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information and Communication Security. 494--508.

Digital Library

[16]

James Heather. 2007. Implementing STV securely in Prêt à Voter. In Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium. 157--169.

Digital Library

[17]

Markus Jakobsson, Ari Juels, and Ronald Rivest. 2002. Making mix nets robust for electronic voting by randomized partial checking. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium. 339--353.

Digital Library

[18]

John Kelsey, Andrew Regenscheid, Tal Moran, and David Chaum. 2010. Attacking paper-based E2E voting systems. In Towards Trustworthy Elections. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 370--387.

Digital Library

[19]

Shahram Khazaei and Douglas Wikström. 2013. Randomized partial checking revisited. In Topics in Cryptology, CT-RSA 2013. Springer, 115--128.

Digital Library

[20]

R. Küsters, T. Truderung, and A. Vogt. 2012. Clash attacks on the verifiability of e-voting systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2012). IEEE Computer Society, 395--409.

Digital Library

[21]

Thomas R. Magrino, Ronald L. Rivest, Emily Shen, and David Wagner. 2011. Computing the margin of victory in IRV elections. In Proceedings of the USENIX Accurate Electronic Voting Technology Workshop on Trustworthy Elections.

Digital Library

[22]

C. Andrew Neff. 2001. A verifiable secret shuffle and its application to e-voting. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 116--125.

Digital Library

[23]

Ronald L. Rivest. 2008. On the notion of “software independence” in voting systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 366, 1881 (2008), 3759--3767.

[24]

Peter Y. A. Ryan, David Bismark, James Heather, Steve Schneider, and Zhe Xia. 2009. Prêt à Voter: A voter-verifiable voting system. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 4, 4 (2009), 662--673.

Digital Library

[25]

Daniel R. Sandler, Kyle Derr, and Dan S. Wallach. 2008. VoteBox: A tamper-evident, verifiable electronic voting system. In Proceedings of the 17th USENIX.

Digital Library

[26]

Victorian Electoral Commission. 2007. Report to Parliament on the 2006 Victorian State Election. Retrieved from https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/files/ER-2006-TheVictorianStateelectionataglance.pdf.

[27]

Douglas Wikström. 2012. Verificatum. Retrieved from http://www.verificatum.org/verificatum/.

[28]

Adam L. Young and Moti Yung. 2004. Malicious Cryptography - Exposing Cryptovirology. Wiley.

Digital Library

Cited By

Graf MKüsters RRausch DEgger SBechtold MFlinspach M(2024)Accountable Bulletin Boards: Definition and Provably Secure Implementation2024 IEEE 37th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00013(201-216)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00013
Doan TPereira OPeters T(2024)Encryption Mechanisms for Receipt-Free and Perfectly Private Verifiable ElectionsApplied Cryptography and Network Security10.1007/978-3-031-54770-6_11(257-287)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54770-6_11
Ren JZaghloul ELi T(2023)d-BAEV: Distributed Blockchain-Based Anonymous Electronic Voting2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS)10.1109/MASS58611.2023.00058(415-421)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MASS58611.2023.00058
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

vVote: A Verifiable Voting System

Recommendations

The complexity of losing voters
AAMAS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

We consider the scenario of a parliament that is going to vote on a specific important issue. The voters are grouped in parties, and all voters of a party vote in the same way. The expected winner decision is known, because parties declare their ...
Distributed ElGamal à la Pedersen: Application to Helios
WPES '13: Proceedings of the 12th ACM workshop on Workshop on privacy in the electronic society

Real-world elections often require threshold cryptosystems so that any t out of l trustees can proceed to tallying. This is needed to protect the confidentiality of the voters' votes against curious authorities (at least t+1 trustees must collude to ...
Election Verifiability for Helios under Weaker Trust Assumptions
Computer Security - ESORICS 2014
Abstract
Most electronic voting schemes aim at providing verifiability: voters should trust the result without having to rely on some authorities. Actually, even a prominent voting system like Helios cannot fully achieve verifiability since a dishonest ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Information and System Security

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security Volume 18, Issue 1

June 2015

126 pages

ISSN:1094-9224

EISSN:1557-7406

DOI:10.1145/2786062

Editor:
Gene Tsudik
University of California at Irvine, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 June 2015

Accepted: 01 March 2015

Revised: 01 December 2014

Received: 01 July 2014

Published in TISSEC Volume 18, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

Fonds National de Recherche (FNR) Luxembourg SeRTVS project
EPSRC Trustworthy Voting Systems project EP/G025797/1

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

34
Total Citations
View Citations
776
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)18
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 07 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Graf MKüsters RRausch DEgger SBechtold MFlinspach M(2024)Accountable Bulletin Boards: Definition and Provably Secure Implementation2024 IEEE 37th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00013(201-216)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF61375.2024.00013
Doan TPereira OPeters T(2024)Encryption Mechanisms for Receipt-Free and Perfectly Private Verifiable ElectionsApplied Cryptography and Network Security10.1007/978-3-031-54770-6_11(257-287)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54770-6_11
Ren JZaghloul ELi T(2023)d-BAEV: Distributed Blockchain-Based Anonymous Electronic Voting2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS)10.1109/MASS58611.2023.00058(415-421)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MASS58611.2023.00058
Jamroga WKurpiewski DMalvone VGroß TViganò L(2022)How to measure usable securityJournal of Computer Security10.3233/JCS-21004930:3(381-409)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/JCS-210049
Suwito MTama BSantoso BDutta STan HYoshifumi USakurai KSuga YSakurai KDing XSako K(2022)A Systematic Study of Bulletin Board and Its ApplicationProceedings of the 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3488932.3527280(1213-1215)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488932.3527280
Farzaliyev VKrips KWillemson JHung CHong JBechini ASong E(2021)Developing a Personal Voting Machine for the Estonian Internet Voting SystemProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442034(1607-1616)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412841.3442034
Zaghloul ELi TRen J(2021) d -BAME: Distributed Blockchain-Based Anonymous Mobile Electronic Voting IEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2021.30748778:22(16585-16597)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2021.3074877
Boyen XHaines TMüller J(2021)Epoque: Practical End-to-End Verifiable Post-Quantum-Secure E-Voting2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00027(272-291)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00027
Hirschi LSchmid LBasin D(2021)Fixing the Achilles Heel of E-Voting: The Bulletin Board2021 IEEE 34th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF51468.2021.00016(1-17)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF51468.2021.00016
Panja SRoy B(2021)A secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using blockchain and cloud serverJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2021.10281559(102815)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2021.102815
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents