Using Sharemind as a Tool to Develop an Internet Voting System with Secure Multiparty Computation

Abstract

Internet voting is one electronic voting technology that is seen as having the potential to increase voter turnout by making voting more accessible as it allows the voter to vote from anywhere. For Internet voting to become more acceptable to voters, it must satisfy both privacy and verifiability. However, a problem with most current Internet voting systems is they need to trust a third party to store and tally the votes. This need to trust a third party risks the privacy of the votes in the event that the third party becomes malicious. One way to eliminate the need to trust a third party is through secure multiparty computation (SMC). In SMC, a vote is secretly-shared among multiple non-colluding parties. These parties also jointly tally the votes. Since no single party has the copy of all the parts of a vote, it will be impossible for a single party to learn about a vote. With Sharemind SDK, the development of an application system that uses SMC becomes easier. In our work, we discuss how we used Sharemind SDK in the development of an Internet voting system that satisfies both privacy and verifiability.