VSPReP: Verifiable, Secure and Privacy-Preserving Remote Polling with Untrusted Computing Devices

Abstract

Internet-based polling systems allow voters to cast their votes at any time during the polling period, from any Internet-connected computing device anywhere in the world. Security is an important feature of such systems that should address inherent concerns, such as secrecy of vote, anonymity and unlinkability of voter, voter coercion, secrecy of intermediate results, verifiability, auditability, and poll integrity. Another major concern is that an infected voting device with a malicious program (e.g., virus, malware) could take control over the vote casting process and make unauthorized and potentially undetected modifications to the voter’s voting choices, and, hence, should not be trusted. In this paper we present VSPReP, a verifiable, secure and privacy-preserving remote polling (e-poll) system, which provides vote’s privacy and poll integrity, prevents double voting, enables multiple voting (within the allowed polling period), and achieves verifiability (cast-as-intended and tallied-as-recorded) and uncoercibility in the presence of an untrusted voting device. This paper presents a general design of VSPReP and describes its workflow during three polling phases: pre-polling, polling and post-polling. It also analyzes the security properties of VSPReP and evaluates its performance in terms of computational and cryptographic costs. The experimental results show that the average time a voter takes to cast his/her vote is less than 45 secs, thus demonstrating the practicality of VSPReP.