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| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Voting Verification Mechanism for a Distributed Ledger based Remote Electronic Voting System |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Date | 2021 |
| Abstract Text | Fair, secure and trustworthy voting processes and elections are a cornerstone of any functioning democracy. Caused by the ongoing digitalization and digitization, new ways of voting are emerging. A highly discussed and promising topic is remote electrical voting, which allows users to cast their votes independent of the location and additionally (partly) independent of the used device. The combination of this would bring more flexibility to voters since they must not be present at a poll station at a particular time. For countries already allowing voting by mail, remote electronic voting is an evolution of this known practice. As with every new technology, also with remote electrical voting, many obstacles must be conquered before it will be secure and reliable enough to be rolled out to the public. Especially in the scenario of electronic voting, cryptographic operations and encryption must be applied to guarantee features like vote secrecy, the resistance against coercion, or prevention against vote selling. Nevertheless, a voter must be condident that the indeed selected voting option is encrypted, transferred to the ballot box, and later counted in the tally. Proving this to the voter is not trivially since most electrical and cryptographic operations performed on data are not comprehensible and not verifiable without proper auxiliary tools. This work focuses on the verification of the encryption of a selected voting option. The verification allows voters to verify if a ballot contains the chosen voting option or if the voting device tampers the selection before encrypting it. This will enable voters to verify whether their voting setup encrypts the selection trustworthy or if the voting device is cheating and altering the selection. Hence, voting with an unknown, unfamiliar, or not trusted device is possible. The thesis shows how to successfully implement the cast-as-intended property with the help of the challenge-or-cast mechanism into an existing remote electronic voting system. The challenge-or-cast mechanism allows voters to either challenge the encryption of a ballot or cast it. For the verification, a second device is needed such that the encryption can be repeated in an air-gapped environment. Furthermore, the challenge-or cast approach is compared to other mechanisms having the same goal. Towards the end, the selected method is analyzed and discussed, revealing strengths, weaknesses, chances, and concerns. |
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