Information Security Seminar 

30/04/2010, 15:00 — 16:00 — Room P4.35, Mathematics Building
Mark Ryan, University of Birmingham

Election Verifiability in Trustworthy Voting Systems

Electronic voting presents a challenging set of requirements, including verifiability of the result, and incoercibility of the voters. I will review some of the main ideas in the last decade. The body of the talk will focus on my work on formalising the idea of result verifiability. We distinguish three aspects, and use the applied pi calculus to define them. We show how those aspects can be evaluated for a range of election systems in the literature. Election verifiability intuitively appears to conflict with incoercibility; we show that our definition is compatible with our previous definition of coercion resistance and exhibit some systems that satisfy both. Joint work with Steve Kremer and Ben Smyth.