Abstract
Recently, Muş, Kiraz, Cenk and Sertkaya proposed an improvement over the present Estonian Internet voting vote verification scheme [6]. This paper points to the weaknesses and questionable design choices of the new scheme. We show that the scheme does not fix the vote privacy issue it claims to. It also introduces a way for a malicious voting application to manipulate the vote without being detected by the verification mechanism, hence breaking the cast-as-intended property. As a solution, we propose modifying the protocol of Muş et al. slightly and argue for improvement of the security guarantees. However, there is inherent drop in usability in the protocol as proposed by Muş et al., and this issue will also remain in our improved protocol.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course we assume here that the voter’s computer is honest in the sense that it does not send the QR code anywhere else. But if it would be willing to do so in order to break the voter’s privacy, it could already send away the vote itself.
- 2.
“Valimised” means “Elections” in Estonian.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research (EXCITE) and the Estonian Research Council under Institutional Research Grant IUT27-1. The authors are also grateful to Arnis Paršovs for pointing out a flaw in an earlier version of the improved protocol.
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Kubjas, I., Pikma, T., Willemson, J. (2017). Estonian Voting Verification Mechanism Revisited Again. In: Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Braun Binder, N., Kersting, N., Pereira, O., Schürmann, C. (eds) Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10615. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_19
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