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Coercion-Resistant Cast-as-Intended Verifiability for Computationally Limited Voters

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops (FC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13953))

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Abstract

In this work, we investigate if two essential properties in electronic voting, coercion-resistance and cast-as-intended verifiability, can be jointly achieved in settings where voters are (very) limited from a computational point of view. This may be the case in elections where voters use a voting station or webpage to cast their votes but do not have specialized software or devices to perform complicated cryptographic operations (for instance, to verify zero-knowledge proofs or to generate one-way trapdoors).

We provide a solution where the only things voters have to do are: remember and compare strings of numbers, on the one hand, and press a button at the appropriate moment, on the other hand. This button activates the participation of an online entity, which is trusted to choose a random nonce for each voter and to publish it only when that voter presses the button (and not before). The most expensive part of the verification is an OR proof of knowledge, which can be done by any (powerful enough) external verifier.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN), under Project PID2019-109379RB-I00, and by Generalitat de Catalunya, under Project 2018 DI 038.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Matemàtiques, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Tamara Finogina & Javier Herranz

  2. Scytl Election Technologies, S.L.U., Barcelona, Spain

    Tamara Finogina

Authors
  1. Tamara Finogina
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  2. Javier Herranz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Javier Herranz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Aleksander Essex

  2. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

  3. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Oksana Kulyk

  4. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Lewis Gudgeon

  5. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Ariah Klages-Mundt

  6. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Daniel Perez

  7. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Sam Werner

  8. Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  9. University College London, London, UK

    Geoff Goodell

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Finogina, T., Herranz, J. (2024). Coercion-Resistant Cast-as-Intended Verifiability for Computationally Limited Voters. In: Essex, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops. FC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13953. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48806-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48806-1_3

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