Abstract
In this paper we revisit the seminal coercion-resistant e-voting protocol by Juels, Catalano and Jakobsson (JCJ) and in particular the attempts to make it usable and practical. In JCJ the user needs to handle cryptographic credentials and be able to fake these in case of coercion. In a series of three papers Neumann et al. analysed the usability of JCJ, and constructed and implemented a practical credential handling system using a smart card which unlock the true credential via a PIN code, respectively fake the credential via faking the PIN. We present several attacks and problems with the security of this protocol, especially an attack on coercion-resistance due to information leakage from the removal of duplicate ballots.
Another problem, already stressed but not solved by Neumann et al, is that PIN typos happen frequently and would invalidate the cast vote without the voter being able to detect this. We construct different protocols which repair these problems. Further, the smart card is a trusted component which can invalidate cast votes without detection and can be removed by a coercer to force abstention, i.e. presenting a single point of failure. Hence we choose to make the protocols hardware-flexible i.e. also allowing the credentials to be store by ordinary means, but still being PIN based and providing PIN error resilience. Finally, one of the protocols has a linear tally complexity to ensure an efficient scheme also with many voters .
This research were supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).
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Notes
- 1.
In general this is not good for coercion-resistance since a coercer might detect a voter not following instructions across elections, see [8].
- 2.
Note that the coercer does not have to let the voter know that he follows this strategy. The voter only knows that the coercer has access to the card for some short time. Based on this, she could also decide not to cast her true vote at all, but then the protocol could not really be called coercion-resistant since the coercer has a very efficient strategy to force abstention.
- 3.
Note there is a small problem here since we are in composite order groups and the polynomials might have more roots than the allowed PINs. However, the probability in general is negligible.
- 4.
This will give a random correct vote. The policy “Last valid vote counts” can be implemented by adding the received order to \(t_i\).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Research Council of Norway for the joint project SURCVS and by the FNR CORE project FESS.
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Estaji, E., Haines, T., Gjøsteen, K., Rønne, P.B., Ryan, P.Y.A., Soroush, N. (2020). Revisiting Practical and Usable Coercion-Resistant Remote E-Voting. In: Krimmer, R., et al. Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12455. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60347-2_4
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