A Formal Approach to Coercion Resistance and Its Application to E-Voting

Stanislas Riou,Oksana Kulyk,David Yeregui Marcos Del Blanco

doi:10.3390/math10050781

Stanislas Riou, Oksana Kulyk + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/math10050781

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Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to electronic voting—this time as a potential option to contain the spread during elections. One of the long unresolved topics with remote voting is the risk of voter’s coercion due to the uncontrolled environment in which it takes place, indicating the importance of the coercion resistance property. In the present article, the authors conduct a database analysis of over 350 articles to present different formal definitions of coercion resistance based on three frameworks (game-based definitions, applied pi-calculus, and logic). Finally, the different security properties of each one are studied and compared in order to facilitate the development of electronic voting schemes.

Highlights

This paper introduces the identification of different formal definitions of coercion resistance available in e-voting literature
The first formal definition of coercion resistance was introduced by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson in [1]
Coercion resistance is a security property that can be expressed in a wide variety of ways

Summary

Introduction

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, discussions about online voting have become prominent due to the increased health risks of traditional, presential voting. Despite its advantages, online voting inherently brings certain security risks. The risk of voter coercion, ranging from an adversary asking for proof of a voter’s choice to a coercer monitoring the voting process has been at the core within the pending challenges. Any further deployment of e-voting schemes should address the coercion resistance property, which was first defined in [1]. A coercion-resistant scheme guarantees the voter’s privacy even if an attacker can monitor the process and communicate with the voter. A number of such schemes have been proposed, relying on different assumptions about the attackers’ capabilities, as well as security assurances against coercion defined through formal specifications (e.g., cryptographic definitions)

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