A practical, secure, and auditable e-voting system

Abstract

A cryptographic electronic voting system is proposed, to replace the conventional voting methods, which are widely used in most developing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The proposed e-voting system is based on the concept of Prêt à Voter, which is a paper ballot e-voting scheme. Mixnet based e-voting schemes such as Prêt à Voter use mix servers to create anonymous channels. These schemes have some shortcomings; Mixnets need complex protocols for generating and maintaining shared mix keys, as well as for mixing and proving correctness of the shuffles. Moreover, Mixnets are complex to implement on a large scale. Mixnets are also vulnerable to corrupt or faulty mix servers as well. The proposed e-voting scheme eliminates the need for anonymous channels to anonymize the votes in Mixnet based e-voting schemes, yet provides comparable level of security and vote anonymity with less system complexity. The proposed e-voting scheme uses paper ballots, due to its familiarity among the public, but with strong cryptographic algorithms with proven security features, to provide enhanced level of ballot secrecy, verifiability and security. The proposed scheme is simple, secure, practical, and auditable. Security evaluation is conducted based on the critical and desirable properties of e-voting to support the claimed aspects. Threat analysis of the proposed e-voting system had been conducted to prove its resistance to well-known attacks on e-voting schemes and systems. A proof of concept implementation and simulation of the proposed e-voting scheme was developed to elucidate its efficiency, practicality, and scalability. The research proposal has the potential to be deployed as a trustworthy e-voting system, to replace the conventional voting methods in developing countries.