Evaluating Security of Voting Schemes in the Universal Composability Framework

In the literature, voting protocols are considered secure if they satisfy requirements such as privacy, accuracy, robustness, etc. It can be time consuming to evaluate a voting protocol with respect to all these requirements and it is not clear that the list of known requirements is complete. Perhaps because of this many papers on electronic voting do not offer any security proof at all. As a solution to this, we suggest evaluating voting schemes in the universal composability framework. We investigate the popular class of voting schemes based on homomorphic threshold encryption. It turns out that schemes in this class realize an ideal voting functionality that takes the votes as input and outputs the result. This ideal functionality corresponds closely to the well-known ballot box model used today in manual voting. Security properties such as privacy, accuracy and robustness now follow as easy corollaries. We note that some security requirements, for instance incoercibility, are not ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACNS
• Authors: Jens Groth
• Keywords: ACNS 2004, Adaptive Adversaries, Cryptology, Ideal Voting Functionality, Voting Protocol