Paper 2021/1501

Relations between Privacy, Verifiability, Accountability and Coercion-Resistance in Voting Protocols

Alisa Pankova and Jan Willemson

Abstract

This paper studies quantitative relationships between privacy, verifiability, accountability, and coercion-resistance of voting protocols. We adapt existing definitions to make them better comparable with each other and determine which bounds a certain requirement on one property poses on some other property. It turns out that, in terms of proposed definitions, verifiability and accountability do not necessarily put constraints on privacy and coercion-resistance. However, the relations between these notions become more interesting in the context of particular attacks. Depending on the assumptions and the attacker's goal, voter coercion may benefit from a too weak as well as too strong verifiability.

Note: This is a full version of the paper accepted to ACNS 2022.