Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/473

The Norwegian Internet Voting Protocol

Kristian Gjøsteen

Abstract: The Norwegian government ran a trial of internet remote voting during the 2011 local government elections, and will run another trial during the 2013 parliamentary elections. A new cryptographic voting protocol will be used, where so-called return codes allow voters to verify that their ballots will be counted as cast.

This paper discusses this cryptographic protocol, and in particular the ballot submission phase.

The security of the protocol relies on a novel hardness assumption similar to Decision Diffie-Hellman. While DDH is a claim that a random subgroup of a non-cyclic group is indistinguishable from the whole group, our assumption is related to the indistinguishability of certain special subgroups. We discuss this question in some detail.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Decision Diffie-Hellman, electronic voting

Date: received 1 Aug 2013, last revised 9 Aug 2013

Contact author: kristian gjosteen at math ntnu no

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: The definition of B-privacy was wrong, it has been corrected. Also, some other minor mistakes have been fixed.

Version: 20130809:133630 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/473

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion