About
Date: January 25, 2024
Time: 10am-12pm, 12:45pm-3pm (EST)
Location: Zoom
Instructor: Anunay Kulshrestha (email)
This seminar will focus on verifiability in secret ballot elections. We will discuss motivations for verification and perform group activities using ElectionGuard to understand how such systems could be implemented. In particular, participants will learn about end-to-end verifiability and risk-limiting audits.
No background in cryptography or information security will be assumed. Mathematical maturity and some experience with Python will be useful.
Schedule
10am-11am: Introduction and Motivation
11am-12pm: ElectionGuard v2
12pm-12:45pm: Lunch Break
12:45pm-2:30pm: Group Activity
2:30pm-3pm: Conclusion and Discussion
Group Activity
Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two groups. All participants in a group will collaboratively explore usage of ElectionGuard in the given setting.
Group I: End-to-end Verifiability (E2EV)
Group II: Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs)
Resources
- Jupyter Notebook: Download
- ElectionGuard: Documentation · Specification · Code
Further Reading
- J. Benaloh, T. Moran, L. Naish, K. Ramchen, and V. Teague. Shuffle-sum: coercion-resistant verifiable tallying for STV voting. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 4(4):685–698, 2009.
- M. Bernhard, A. McDonald, H. Meng, J. Hwa, N. Bajaj, K. Chang, and J. A. Halderman. Can voters detect malicious manipulation of ballot marking devices? In 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pages 679–694. IEEE, 2020.
- D. Chaum and T. P. Pedersen. Wallet databases with observers. In Annual international cryptology conference, pages 89–105. Springer, 1992.
- D. Chaum. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 24(2):84–90, 1981.
- R. Cramer, I. Damg ̊ard, and B. Schoenmakers. Proofs of partial knowledge and simplified design of witness hiding protocols. In Annual International Cryptology Conference, pages 174–187. Springer, 1994.
- H. Devillez, O. Pereira, and T. Peters. How to verifiably encrypt many bits for an election? In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, pages 653–671. Springer, 2022.
- T. ElGamal. A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms. IEEE transactions on information theory, 31(4):469–472, 1985.
- A. Fiat and A. Shamir. How to prove yourself: Practical solutions to identification and signature problems. In Conference on the theory and application of cryptographic techniques, pages 186–194. Springer, 1986.
- M. Lindeman and P. B. Stark. A gentle introduction to risk-limiting audits. IEEE Security & Privacy, 10(5):42–49, 2012.
- C. P. Schnorr. Efficient identification and signatures for smart cards. In Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO’89 Proceedings, pages 239–252. Springer, 1990.
- A. Shamir. How to share a secret. Communications of the ACM, 22(11):612–613, 1979.