Skip to main content

Provably Improving Election Verifiability in Belenios

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2021)

Abstract

Belenios is an online voting system that provides a strong notion of election verifiability, where no single party has to be trusted, and security holds as soon as either the voting registrar or the voting server is honest. It was formally proved to be secure, making the assumption that no further ballots are cast on the bulletin board after voters verified their ballots. In practice, however, revoting is allowed and voters can verify their ballots anytime. This gap between formal proofs and use in practice leaves open space for attacks, as has been shown recently. In this paper we make two simple additions to Belenios and we formally prove that the new version satisfies the expected verifiability properties. Our proofs are automatically performed with the Tamarin prover, under the assumption that voters are allowed to vote at most four times.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Helios - Verifiable online elections. https://heliosvoting.org/

  2. Belenios - Verifiable online voting system. https://belenios.org/

  3. Tamarin prover. https://tamarin-prover.github.io

  4. The Coq proof assistant. https://coq.inria.fr/

  5. Tamarin specifications for the variants of Belenios. https://github.com/sbaloglu/tamarin-codes/tree/main/belenios-zkp

  6. Adida, B.: Helios: web-based open-audit voting. In: van Oorschot, P.C. (ed.) Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Security Symposium, San Jose, CA, USA, 28 July–1 August 2008, pp. 335–348. USENIX Association (2008). http://www.usenix.org/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf

  7. Adida, B., De Marneffe, O., Pereira, O., Quisquater, J.J.: Electing a university president using open-audit voting: analysis of real-world use of Helios. In: 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections. USENIX (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Arapinis, M., Cortier, V., Kremer, S.: When are three voters enough for privacy properties? In: Askoxylakis, I., Ioannidis, S., Katsikas, S., Meadows, C. (eds.) ESORICS 2016. LNCS, vol. 9879, pp. 241–260. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45741-3_13

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Baloglu, S., Bursuc, S., Mauw, S., Pang, J.: Election verifiability revisited: automated security proofs and attacks on Helios and Belenios. In: 34th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (2021). https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/982

  10. Castéran, P., Bertot, Y.: Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development. Coq’Art: The Calculus of Inductive Constructions. Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00344237

  11. Clarkson, M.R., Chong, S., Myers, A.C.: Civitas: toward a secure voting system. In: 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2008), Oakland, California, USA, 18–21 May 2008, pp. 354–368 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2008.32

  12. Comon-Lundh, H., Cortier, V.: Security properties: two agents are sufficient. In: Degano, P. (ed.) ESOP 2003. LNCS, vol. 2618, pp. 99–113. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36575-3_8

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Cortier, V., Dallon, A., Delaune, S.: Bounding the number of agents, for equivalence too. In: Piessens, F., Viganò, L. (eds.) POST 2016. LNCS, vol. 9635, pp. 211–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49635-0_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Cortier, V., Drăgan, C.C., Dupressoir, F., Warinschi, B.: Machine-checked proofs for electronic voting: privacy and verifiability for Belenios. In: Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, pp. 298–312. IEEE Computer Society (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2018.00029

  15. Cortier, V., Filipiak, A., Lallemand, J.: BeleniosVS: secrecy and verifiability against a corrupted voting device. In: 32nd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, pp. 367–381 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2019.00032

  16. Cortier, V., Gaudry, P., Glondu, S.: Belenios: a simple private and verifiable electronic voting system. In: Guttman, J.D., Landwehr, C.E., Meseguer, J., Pavlovic, D. (eds.) Foundations of Security, Protocols, and Equational Reasoning. LNCS, vol. 11565, pp. 214–238. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19052-1_14

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. Cortier, V., Smyth, B.: Attacking and fixing Helios: an analysis of ballot secrecy. J. Comput. Secur. 21(1), 89–148 (2013). https://doi.org/10.3233/JCS-2012-0458

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. ElGamal, T.: A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms. In: Blakley, G.R., Chaum, D. (eds.) CRYPTO 1984. LNCS, vol. 196, pp. 10–18. Springer, Heidelberg (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39568-7_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Hess, A.V., Mödersheim, S., Brucker, A.D., Schlichtkrull, A.: Performing security proofs of stateful protocols. In: 34th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), vol. 1, pp. 143–158. IEEE (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF51468.2021.00006. https://www.brucker.ch/bibliography/abstract/hess.ea-performing-2021

  20. Hirt, M., Sako, K.: Efficient receipt-free voting based on homomorphic encryption. In: Preneel, B. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2000. LNCS, vol. 1807, pp. 539–556. Springer, Heidelberg (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45539-6_38

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Juels, A., Catalano, D., Jakobsson, M.: Coercion-resistant electronic elections. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, WPES, pp. 61–70 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1145/1102199.1102213

  22. Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Verifiability, privacy, and coercion-resistance: new insights from a case study. In: 32nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 538–553. IEEE Computer Society (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2011.21

  23. Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Clash attacks on the verifiability of e-voting systems. In: 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 395–409. IEEE Computer Society (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2012.32

  24. Meier, S., Schmidt, B., Cremers, C., Basin, D.: The TAMARIN prover for the symbolic analysis of security protocols. In: Sharygina, N., Veith, H. (eds.) CAV 2013. LNCS, vol. 8044, pp. 696–701. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39799-8_48

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Pedersen, T.P.: Non-interactive and information-theoretic secure verifiable secret sharing. In: Feigenbaum, J. (ed.) CRYPTO 1991. LNCS, vol. 576, pp. 129–140. Springer, Heidelberg (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46766-1_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Pereira, O., Wallach, D.S.: Clash attacks and the STAR-vote system. In: Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Braun Binder, N., Kersting, N., Pereira, O., Schürmann, C. (eds.) E-Vote-ID 2017. LNCS, vol. 10615, pp. 228–247. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_14

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Schmidt, B., Meier, S., Cremers, C.J.F., Basin, D.A.: Automated analysis of Diffie-Hellman protocols and advanced security properties. In: 25th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, (CSF 2012), pp. 78–94. IEEE Computer Society (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2012.25

Download references

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Research Council of Norway for the joint INTER project SURCVS (No. 11747298).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sevdenur Baloglu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Baloglu, S., Bursuc, S., Mauw, S., Pang, J. (2021). Provably Improving Election Verifiability in Belenios. In: Krimmer, R., et al. Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12900. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86942-7_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86942-7_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-86941-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86942-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics