Proverum: A Hybrid Public Verifiability and Decentralized Identity Management

Trust in electoral processes is fundamental for democracies. Further, the identity management of citizen data is crucial, because final tallies cannot be guaranteed without the assurance that every final vote was cast by an eligible voter. In order to establish a basis for a hybrid public verifiability of voting, this work (1) introduces Proverum, an approach combining a private environment based on private permissioned Distributed Ledgers with a public environment based on public Blockchains, (2) describes the application of the Proverum architecture to the Swiss Remote Postal Voting system, mitigating threats present in the current system, and (3) addresses successfully the decentralized identity management in a federalistic state.

[1]  Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[2]  Josh Benaloh,et al.  Administrative and Public Verifiability: Can We Have Both? , 2008, EVT.

[3]  Philip B. Stark,et al.  End-to-end verifiability , 2015, ArXiv.

[4]  Melanie Volkamer,et al.  Measures to establish trust in internet voting , 2011, ICEGOV '11.

[5]  Burkhard Stiller,et al.  Design and implementation of cast-as-intended verifiability for a blockchain-based voting system , 2020, SAC.

[6]  Jun Pang,et al.  Privacy and verifiability in voting systems: Methods, developments and trends , 2013, Comput. Sci. Rev..

[7]  Burkhard Stiller,et al.  Bifröst: a Modular Blockchain Interoperability API , 2019, 2019 IEEE 44th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN).

[8]  Kazue Sako,et al.  Receipt-Free Mix-Type Voting Scheme - A Practical Solution to the Implementation of a Voting Booth , 1995, EUROCRYPT.

[9]  Srdjan Capkun,et al.  Cyber-Risks in Paper Voting , 2019, ArXiv.

[10]  B. Stiller,et al.  Smart Contracts – Blockchains in the Wings , 2018 .

[11]  Burkhard Stiller,et al.  The Swiss Postal Voting Process and Its System and Security Analysis , 2019, E-VOTE-ID.

[12]  Mark Ryan,et al.  Election Verifiability in Electronic Voting Protocols , 2010, ESORICS.

[13]  Véronique Cortier,et al.  SoK: Verifiability Notions for E-Voting Protocols , 2016, 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[14]  Ben Smyth,et al.  A foundation for secret, verifiable elections , 2018, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..