Abstract
If nobody can prove (even in an all-against-one cooperation) that one did not vote with a particular cast, then one can claim anything about his cast even under oath, and has no fear of being caught. We consider the question of constructing a voting scheme that provides all participants with this “absolute” privacy.
We assume that half of the problem is already solved: The votes are evaluated so that only the result is revealed. Latest achievements of secure coprocessors are supposedly a justification for such a presumption. We prove that even under the presumption that the voting reveals nothing but a result, the privacy of an individual input can withstand an “all-against-one” attack under certain conditions only.
First condition: The function that maps a set of casts to the result of voting must be non-deterministic. Second condition (paradoxically): for any set of casts any result must be possible.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cramer, R., Gennaro, R., Schoenmakers, B.: A secure and optimally efficient multi-authority election scheme. In: Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques. (1997) 103–118
Goldreich, O., Micali, S., Wigderson, A.: How to play any mental game or a completeness theorem for protocols with honest majority. In: Proceedings of STOC’87. (1987)
Goldreich, O.: Preface to special issue on general secure multi-party computation. http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/PS/preSI.ps (1999)
Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 24 (1981) 84–88
Cohen, J., Fischer, M.: A robust and verifiable cryptographically secure election scheme. In: Proceedings of 26th FOCS. (1985)
Cohen, J.: Improving privacy in cryptographic elections. Technical Report 454, Yale University, Department of Computer Science (1986)
Chaum, D.: Elections with unconditionally-secret ballots and disruption equivalent to breaking RSA. In: Advances in Cryptology: Proc. of EuroCrypt’88, LNCS 330, SpringerVerlag. (1988) 177–182
Cramer, R., Franklin, M., Schoenmakers, B., Yung, M.: Multi-authority secret-ballot elections with linear work. In: Proceedings of EUROCRYPT’96, LNCS 1070. (1996)
Gerck, E.: Internet voting requirements. The Bell 1 (2000) 3–5, 11–13
Smith, S.W., Palmer, E.R., Weingart, S.H.: Using a high-performance, programmable secure coprocessor. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Financial Cryptography, Springer-Verlag LNCS. (1998)
Benaloh, J., Tuinstra, D.: Receipt-free secret-ballot elections. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. (1994) 544–553
Hirt, M., Sako, K.: Efficient receipt-free voting based on homomorphic encryption. In Preneel, B., ed.: Advances in Cryptology-EUROCRYPT’00. Volume 1807 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science., Springer-Verlag (2000) 539–556
Kikuchi, H., Akiyama, J., Gobioff, H., Nakamura, G.: Stochastic anonymous voting. Technical Report CMU-CS-98-112, Carnegie Mellon University (1998)
Willenborg, L., de Waal, T.: Statistical Disclosure Control in Practice. Volume 111 of Lecture Notes in Statistics. Springer-Verlag (1996)
Schneier, B.: Applied Cryptography. 2nd edn. Wiley, New York (1996)
Saari, D.G.: Basic Geometry of Voting. Springer-Verlag (1995)
Saari, D.G.: Geometry, voting, and paradoxes. Mathematics Magazine (1998) 243–259
Woodall, D.R.: An impossibility theorem for electoral systems. Discrete Mathematics (1987) 209–211
Saari, D.G.: A dictionary for voting paradoxes. Journal of Economic Theory (1989) 443–475
Nurmi, H.: Voting Paradoxes and How to Deal with Them. Springer-Verlag (1999)
Coughlin, P.J.: Probabilistic Voting Theory. Cambridge University Press (1993)
Enelow, J.M., ed.: Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge University Press (1984)
Enelow, J.M., Hinich, M.J., eds.: Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge University Press (1990)
Samuel Merrill, I., Grofman, B.: A Unified Theory of Voting. Cambridge University Press (1999)
Martin, B.: Democracy without elections. Social Anarchism (1995-96) 18–51
Carson, L., Martin, B.: Random selection in politics. Praeger (1999)
Smith, S.W., Safford, D.: Practical private information retrieval with secure coprocessors. Technical report, IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Asonov, D., Schaal, M., Freytag, JC. (2001). Absolute Privacy in Voting. In: Davida, G.I., Frankel, Y. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2200. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45439-X_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45439-X_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42662-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45439-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive