08/06/2010, 16:15 — 17:15 — Room P4.35, Mathematics Building
Ralf Kuesters, University of Trier
Central Security Requirements of E-Voting Systems: Verifiability,
Accountability, and Coercion-Resistance
Systems for electronic voting (e-voting systems), including systems
for voting over the Internet and systems for voting in a voting
booth, are supposed to simplify the process of carrying out
elections and potentially make the voting process more secure and
reliable. These systems are among the most challenging and complex
security-critical systems, with a rich set of intricate security
requirements they have to fulfill. For example, besides keeping the
votes of individual voters private (privacy of votes), they should
allow voters to check that their votes were counted correctly
(verifiability), since voting machines might have programming
errors or might have been tampered with. By providing voters with
receipts of how they voted, this problem on its own is easy to
solve. However, at the same time vote buying and voter coercion
should be prevented (coercion-resistance). Moreover, in case a
problem occurs, it should be possible to hold election officials
accountable for their misbehavior (accountability). In recent work,
we have formalized important security requirements for e-voting
systems, including coercion-resistance, verifiability, and
accountability. In this talk, I will discuss these requirements
informally and sketch our formal definitions. I will also present
several state-of-the-art voting systems and discuss their security
with respect to our security definitions. The talk is intended for
a broad audience and does not require any background on e-voting
systems or cryptography. This talk is based on joint work with
Tomasz Truderung and Andreas Vogt.
Note exceptional week day and room.
