Pret à Voter with Re-encryption Mixes

Ryan, PYA; Schneider, SA

doi:10.1007/11863908_20

Pret à Voter with Re-encryption Mixes

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Peter Ryan

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.

Abstract

We present a number of enhancements to the voter verifiable election scheme Pret a Voter [CRS05]. Firstly, we propose a mechanism for the distributed construction by a set of independent clerks of the ballot forms. This construction leads to proto-ballot forms with the candidate list encrypted and ensures that only a collusion of all the clerks could determine the cryptographic seeds or the onion/candidate list association. This eliminates the need to trust a single authority to keep this information secret. Furthermore, it allows the on-demand decryption and printing of the ballot forms, so eliminating chain of custody issues and the chain voting style attacks against encrypted receipt schemes identified in [RP05]. The ballot forms proposed here use ElGamal randomised encryption so enabling the use of re-encryption mixes for the anonymising tabulation phase in place of the decryption mixes. This has a number of advantages over the RSA decryption mixes used previously: tolerance against failure of any of the mix tellers, full mixing of terms over the Z(p)* space and enabling the mixes and audits to be fully independently rerun if necessary.