ACE Seminar: Du-Vote: Remote Electronic Voting with Untrusted Computers

Speaker: Prof Mark Ryan​, Birmingham University
UCL Contact: christophe.petit@ucl.ac.uk (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 23 Apr 15, 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: 1.03

Abstract

\duvote is a new remote electronic voting protocol that eliminates the often-required assumption that voters trust general-purpose computers. Trust is distributed in \duvote between a simple hardware token issued to the voter, the voter's computer, and a server run by election authorities. Verifiability is guaranteed with high probability even if all these machines are controlled by the adversary, and privacy is guaranteed as long as at least either the voter's computer, or the server and the hardware token, are not controlled by the adversary. The design of the \duvote protocol is presented in this paper. A new non-interactive zero-knowledge proof is employed to verify the server's computations.

\duvote is a step towards tackling the problem of internet voting on user machines that are likely to have malware. We anticipate that the methods of \duvote can be used in other applications to find ways of achieving \emph{malware tolerance}, that is, ways of securely using platforms that are known or suspected to have malware. ​