English

Ballot stuffing and participation privacy in pollsite voting

Cryptography and Security 2023-05-23 v2

Abstract

We study the problem of simultaneously addressing both ballot stuffing and participation privacy for pollsite voting systems. Ballot stuffing is the attack where fake ballots (not cast by any eligible voter) are inserted into the system. Participation privacy is about hiding which eligible voters have actually cast their vote. So far, the combination of ballot stuffing and participation privacy has been mostly studied for internet voting, where voters are assumed to own trusted computing devices. Such approaches are inapplicable to pollsite voting where voters typically vote bare handed. We present an eligibility audit protocol to detect ballot stuffing in pollsite voting protocols. This is done while protecting participation privacy from a remote observer - one who does not physically observe voters during voting. Our protocol can be instantiated as an additional layer on top of most existing pollsite E2E-V voting protocols. To achieve our guarantees, we develop an efficient zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), that, given a value vv and a set Φ\Phi of commitments, proves vv is committed by some commitment in Φ\Phi, without revealing which one. We call this a ZKP of reverse set membership because of its relationship to the popular ZKPs of set membership. This ZKP may be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.14833,
  title  = {Ballot stuffing and participation privacy in pollsite voting},
  author = {Prashant Agrawal and Abhinav Nakarmi and Mahabir Prasad Jhanwar and Subodh Sharma and Subhashis Banerjee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14833},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

We are withdrawing this paper because we have further developed and expanded the "ZKP of reverse set membership" technique introduced in Section 5 of this paper in another one of our papers titled "Traceable mixnets" (arXiv:2305.08138) and do not wish the technical contributions of the two papers to overlap