skip to main content
10.1145/3548606.3560563acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Themis: An On-Site Voting System with Systematic Cast-as-intended Verification and Partial Accountability

Published: 07 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

We propose an on-site voting system Themis, that aims at improving security when local authorities are not fully trusted. Voters vote thanks to voting sheets as well as smart cards that produce encrypted ballots. Electronic ballots are systematically audited, without compromising privacy. Moreover, the system includes a precise dispute resolution procedure identifying misbehaving parties in most cases.
We conduct a full formal analysis of Themis using ProVerif, with a novel approach in order to cover the modular arithmetic needed in our protocol. In order to evaluate the usability of our system, we organized a voting experiment on a (small) group of voters.

References

[1]
Ben Adida. 2008. Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting. In Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Security Symposium, July 28-August 1, 2008, San Jose, CA, USA, Paul C. van Oorschot (Ed.). USENIX Association, 335--348. http://www.usenix.org/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf
[2]
Andrew Appel, Richard DeMillo, and Philip Stark. 2019. Ballot-Marking Devices (BMDs) Cannot Assure the Will of the Voters. Technical Report. SSRN. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3375755.
[3]
David Basin, Savs a Radomirović, and Lara Schmid. 2020. Dispute resolution in voting. In 2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF). IEEE, 1--16.
[4]
Josh Benaloh. 2006. Simple Verifiable Elections. In Voting Technology Workshop (EVT'06).
[5]
Josh Benaloh, Michael D. Byrne, Bryce Eakin, Philip T. Kortum, Neal McBurnett, Olivier Pereira, Philip B. Stark, Dan S. Wallach, Gail Fisher, Julian Montoya, Michelle Parker, and Michael Winn. 2013. STAR-Vote: A Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable Voting System. In EVT/WOTE.
[6]
Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Bruno Blanchet, and Nadim Kobeissi. 2017. Verified Models and Reference Implementations for the TLS 1.3 Standard Candidate. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'17). 483--502.
[7]
B. Blanchet. 2001. An Efficient Cryptographic Protocol Verifier Based on Prolog Rules. In Proc. 14th Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW'01). IEEE Computer Society Press, 82--96.
[8]
Bruno Blanchet. 2016. Modeling and Verifying Security Protocols with the Applied Pi Calculus and ProVerif. Foundations and Trends in Privacy and Security, Vol. 1, 1--2 (2016), 1-135.
[9]
Bruno Blanchet, Vincent Cheval, and Véronique Cortier. 2022. Machine-Checked Proofs of Privacy for Electronic Voting Protocols. In 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'22).
[10]
Mikaël Bougon, Hervé Chabanne, Véronique Cortier, Alexandre Debant, Emmanuelle Dottax, Jannik Dreier, Pierrick Gaudry, and Mathieu Turuani. 2022. Themis: an On-Site Voting System with Systematic Cast-as-intended Verification and Partial Accountability (full version). Full version, available at https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03763294.
[11]
David Chaum, Richard Carback, Jeremy Clark, Aleksander Essex, Stefan Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Emily Shen, and Alan T. Sherman. 20008. Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes. In USENIX/ACCURATE EVT.
[12]
Michael Clarkson, Stephen Chong, and Andrew Myers. 2008. Civitas: Toward a Secure Voting System. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'08). IEEE Computer Society.
[13]
Vé ronique Cortier, Pierrick Gaudry, and Sté phane Glondu. 2019. Belenios: A Simple Private and Verifiable Electronic Voting System. In Foundations of Security, Protocols, and Equational Reasoning (LNCS), Vol. 11565. Springer, 214--238.
[14]
Stéphanie Delaune, Steve Kremer, and Mark D. Ryan. 2009. Verifying Privacy-type Properties of Electronic Voting Protocols. Journal of Computer Security, Vol. 17, 4 (July 2009), 435--487. https://doi.org/10.3233/JCS-2009-0340
[15]
Rolf Haenni, Reto E. Koenig, Philipp Locher, and Eric Dubuis. 2017. CHVote System Specification. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/325.
[16]
Douglas W. Jones. 2005. Threats to Voting Systems. https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/ jones/voting/nist2005.shtml.
[17]
Ari Juels, Dario Catalano, and Markus Jakobsson. 2005. Coercion-Resistant Electronic Elections. In ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'05). ACM.
[18]
Aggelos Kiayias, Thomas Zacharias, and Bingsheng Zhang. 2015. End-to-End Verifiable Elections in the Standard Model. In Advances in Cryptology (EuroCrypt'15) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Vol. 9057. Springer, 468--498.
[19]
Nadim Kobeissi, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, and Bruno Blanchet. 2017. Automated Verification for Secure Messaging Protocols and Their Implementations: A Symbolic and Computational Approach. In IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P'17). IEEE, 435--450.
[20]
Nadim Kobeissi, Georgio Nicolas, and Karthikeyan Bhargava. 2019. Noise Explorer: Fully Automated Modeling and Verification for Arbitrary Noise Protocols. In 4th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P'19).
[21]
Ralf Küsters, Tomasz Truderung, and Andreas Vogt. 2010. Accountability: definition and relationship to verifiability. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. 526--535.
[22]
Ralf Kü sters, Tomasz Truderung, and Andreas Vogt. 2012. Clash Attacks on the Verifiability of E-Voting Systems. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2012, 21--23 May 2012, San Francisco, California, USA. IEEE Computer Society, 395--409. https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2012.32
[23]
M. Lindeman and P. B. Stark. 2012. A Gentle Introduction to Risk-Limiting Audits. IEEE Security Privacy, Vol. 10, 5 (2012), 42--49.
[24]
Karola Marky, Oksana Kulyk, Karen Renaud, and Melanie Volkamer. 2018. What Did I Really Vote For? On the Usability of Verifiable E-Voting Schemes. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal QC, Canada) (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173750
[25]
Peter Ryan, Peter Rønne, and Vincenzo Iovino. 2016. Selene: Voting with Transparent Verifiability and Coercion-Mitigation. In Financial Cryptography Workshops 2016. 176--192.
[26]
Peter Y.A. Ryan and Steve Schneider. 2006. Prêtà Voter with re-encryption mixes. In 11th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (Esorics'06). 313--326.
[27]
Douglas Wikström. 2022. The Verificatum Mixnet. https://www.verificatum.org/.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Themis: An On-Site Voting System with Systematic Cast-as-intended Verification and Partial Accountability

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    November 2022
    3598 pages
    ISBN:9781450394505
    DOI:10.1145/3548606
    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 ACM 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]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 07 November 2022

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. accountability
    2. cast-as-intended
    3. e-voting
    4. formal methods

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CCS '22
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

    Upcoming Conference

    CCS '24
    ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    October 14 - 18, 2024
    Salt Lake City , UT , USA

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)94
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media