E-vote and Pki's: a Need, a Bliss or a Curse?

With the increasing popularity public key infrastructures have been acquiring in recent years and the legislative support for digital signatures, electronic voting protocols are moving from a strictly research area to the commercial arena. In this paper we examine the role public key infrastructures play in electronic voting in various protocols proposed in the literature, some of which are the kernel of experimental projects and/or commercial products. Although one of the rationales to move towards electronic voting systems is cost-effectiveness, in this paper we argue that performance issues should not be overlooked, especially in case of disaster recovery, were a CA to revoke all of its certificates during an election. Based on performance evaluation studies, we show that directory service access may become the system bottleneck.

[1]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  Electronic voting: computerized polls may save money, protect privacy , 1996, CROS.

[2]  Josh Benaloh,et al.  Receipt-free secret-ballot elections (extended abstract) , 1994, STOC '94.

[3]  Brandon William Durette.  Multiple Administrators for Electronic Voting , 1999 .

[4]  Jie Wang,et al.  Towards a practical, secure, and very large scale online election , 1999, Proceedings 15th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'99).

[5]  Mark A. Herschberg,et al.  Secure electronic voting over the World Wide Web , 1997 .

[6]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  Sensus: a security-conscious electronic polling system for the Internet , 1997, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[7]  Berry Schoenmakers.  Compensating for a lack of transparency , 2000, CFP '00.

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

[9]  David Chaum,et al.  Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete , 1985, CACM.

[10]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[11]  Michael J. Radwin.  An untraceable , universally verifiable voting scheme , 1997 .

[12]  Michael J. Fischer,et al.  A robust and verifiable cryptographically secure election scheme , 1985, 26th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1985).

[13]  Ronald Cramer,et al.  A Secure and Optimally Efficient Multi-Authority Election Scheme ( 1 ) , 2000 .

[14]  Kaoru Kurosawa,et al.  Efficient Anonymous Channel and All/Nothing Election Scheme , 1994, EUROCRYPT.

[15]  Josh Benaloh,et al.  Receipt-Free Secret-Ballot Elections , 1994, STOC 1994.

[16]  Atsushi Fujioka,et al.  A Practical Secret Voting Scheme for Large Scale Elections , 1992, AUSCRYPT.

[17]  Arto Salomaa,et al.  Verifying and Recasting Secret Ballots in Computer Networks , 1991, New Results and New Trends in Computer Science.

[18]  Hannu A. Aronsson.  Zero Knowledge Protocols and Small Systems , 1995 .

[19]  Adi Shamir,et al.  How to share a secret , 1979, CACM.

[20]  Russ Housley,et al.  Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile , 1999, RFC.

[21]  Emmanouil Magkos,et al.  Receipt-Freeness in Large-Scale Elections without Untappable Channels , 2001, I3E.

[22]  David Chaum,et al.  Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments , 1982, CRYPTO.

[23]  C. Andrew Neff,et al.  A verifiable secret shuffle and its application to e-voting , 2001, CCS '01.

[24]  Lila Kari,et al.  Secret ballot elections in computer networks , 1991, Computers & security.

[25]  Boris Balacheff,et al.  A trusted process to digitally sign a document , 2001, NSPW '01.

[26]  Josh D. Cohen,et al.  Improving Privacy in Cryptographic Elections , 1986 .

[27]  Tim Polk,et al.  Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Representation of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) Keys and Signatures in Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificates , 1999 .

[28]  Lam Berry Schoenmakers,et al.  Fully auditable electronic secret-ballot elections , 2000 .

[29]  David Chaum,et al.  Elections with Unconditionally-Secret Ballots and Disruption Equivalent to Breaking RSA , 1988, EUROCRYPT.

[30]  Danilo Bruschi,et al.  A quantitative study of Public Key Infrastructures , 2003, Comput. Secur..