Remote Prêt à Voter 1.0 (FPTP): a voter-verifiable and receipt-free remote voting Zhe Xia (Joson) July 19, 2012

Objectives As secure as the supervised verifiable voting schemes As practical as well And remote voting

Properties Privacy Receipt-freeness Coercion resistance Voter verifiability Universal verifiability Easy to understand Simple to use Remote No scheme can do this at the moment

Receipt-freeness and vote-buying Receipt-freeness prevents coercion and vote-buying False sense of security on this Without the receipt-freeness protection, vote-buying is financially feasible in many cases The recent Greek election actually decided whether to repay the country’s €360bn debt. It has around 7 million voters. If some party (e.g. HSBC) pays each voter €10,000 to buy her vote, this party only pays €35bn to buy half of the votes. US has around 200 million voters. If some party (e.g. Chinese government) pays each voter $10,000 to buy her vote, this party only pays $1tn to buy half of the votes. China has a currency reserve of $3.2tn.

Receipt-freeness is not free {vote} pk Code voting style schemes suffers this as well …

Receipt-freeness needs untappable channel Authentication channel b Untappable channel {a} pk {vote} pk = {a + b} pk

Voting Ceremony

Registration Phase 3 2 {3} pk {2} pk

Voting Phase 32 Alice 1 Bob 3 Charlie 0 David 2 Echo 4 3 Bare hand, most vulnerabilities at the voting client no longer exist !

Tallying Phase {3} pk {2} pk 3 {3} pk 3 * {2} pk = {3*3 + 2} pk Bob

Prêt à Voter  Remote Prêt à Voter Charlie Alice David Bob X Echo {3} pk {2} pk Index = 3 [Ryan & Teague 2009] Permutations in Prêt à Voter

Florentine Square k/ik/i Suppose k is the row index and i is the column index, v = k * i (mod 5) We can also permute any row by s, so that v = k * i + s (mod 5) k/ik/i i.e. s = 2 Property: the distance of any two values are uniformly distributed in different rows.

Election Book Generation CandidateCode Alice0 Bob1 Charlie2 David3 Echo4 k/ik/i k = 3, s = 2 v = k * i + s (mod 5) { Charlie :, Alice :, David :, Bob :, Echo : } { Alice : 1, Bob : 3, Charlie : 0, David : 2, Echo : 4 } 32 Alice 1 Bob 3 Charlie 0 David 2 Echo

Discussions Our aim is to provide a voter-verifiable and receipt-free remote voting Bare hand voting, the information sent remotely tells nothing Remote and supervised Prêt à Voter can be tallied together All building blocks are well analysed, e.g. Prêt à Voter, Florentine Square The voter may be forced to change her choice index, but this is similar as the randomisation attack Restrictions: cannot handle 10+ candidates, nor STV, dummy candidates may need to be added to the candidate list Note: the slides only demonstrate the basic ideas, please do not use them for security analysis

Thank you