Paper 2014/625

Pretty Understandable Democracy 2.0

Stephan Neumann, Christian Feier, Perihan Sahin, and Sebastian Fach

Abstract

The technological advance is entering almost all aspects of our everyday life. One interesting aspect is the possibility to conduct elections over the Internet. However, many proposed Internet voting schemes and systems build on unrealistic assumptions about the trustworthiness of the voting environment and other voter-side assumptions. Code voting -- first introduced by Chaum [Cha01] -- is one approach that minimizes the voter-side assumptions. The voting scheme Pretty UnderstandableDemocracy [BNOV13] builds on the idea of code voting while it ensures on the server-side an arguably practical security model based on a strict separation of duty, i.e. all security requirements are ensured if any two components do not collaborate in order to violate the corresponding requirement. As code voting and strict separation of duty realizations come along with some challenges (e.g. pre-auditing phase, usability issues, clearAPIs), the goal of our research was to implement Pretty UnderstandableDemocracy and run a trial election. This paper reports about necessary refinements of the original scheme, the implementation process, and atrial election among the different development teams (each team being responsible for one component).