Paper 2024/742

Efficient Universally-Verifiable Electronic Voting with Everlasting Privacy

David Pointcheval, École Normale Supérieure - PSL, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, French National Centre for Scientific Research
Abstract

Universal verifiability is a must-to-have for electronic voting schemes. It is essential to ensure honest behavior of all the players during the whole process, together with the eligibility. However, it should not endanger the privacy of the individual votes, which is another major requirement. Whereas the first property prevents attacks during the voting process, privacy of the votes should hold forever, which has been called everlasting privacy. A classical approach for universal verifiability is to add some proofs together with the encrypted votes, which requires publication of the latter, while eligibility needs a link between the votes and the voters: it definitely excludes long-term privacy. An alternative is the use of perfectly-hiding commitments, on which proofs are published, while ciphertexts are kept private for computing the tally. In this paper, we show how recent linearly-homomorphic signatures can be exploited for all the proofs, leading to very efficient procedures towards universal verifiability with both strong receipt-freeness and everlasting privacy. Privacy will indeed be unconditional, after the publication of the results and the proofs, whereas the soundness of the proofs holds in the algebraic group model and the random oracle model.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. 14th International Conference on Security and Cryptography for Networks – SCN 2024
Keywords
Electronic VotingUniversal VerifiabilityEverlasting SecrecyZero-Knowledge Proofs
Contact author(s)
david pointcheval @ ens fr
History
2024-07-06: revised
2024-05-15: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/742
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/742,
      author = {David Pointcheval},
      title = {Efficient Universally-Verifiable Electronic Voting with Everlasting Privacy},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/742},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/742}
}
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