Paper 2022/430

Is the JCJ voting system really coercion-resistant?

Véronique Cortier
Pierrick Gaudry
Quentin Yang
Abstract

Coercion-resistance is a security property of electronic voting, often considered as a must-have for high-stake elections. The JCJ voting scheme, proposed in 2005 by Juels, Catalano and Jakobsson, is still the reference paradigm when designing a coercion-resistant protocol. We highlight a weakness in JCJ that is also present in all the systems following its general structure. This comes from the procedure that precedes the tally, where the trustees remove the ballots that should not be counted. This phase leaks more information than necessary, leading to potential threats for the coerced voters. Fixing this leads to the notion of cleansing-hiding, that we apply to form a variant of JCJ that we call CHide. One reason for the problem not being seen before is the fact that the associated formal definition of coercion-resistance was too weak. We therefore propose a definition that takes into account more behaviors such as revoting or the addition of fake ballots by authorities. We then prove that CHide is coercion-resistant for this definition.

Note: This is the long version of the paper published at CSF 2024.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. IEEE CSF 2024
Keywords
election schemes
Contact author(s)
pierrick gaudry @ loria fr
History
2024-02-13: last of 2 revisions
2022-04-06: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/430
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/430,
      author = {Véronique Cortier and Pierrick Gaudry and Quentin Yang},
      title = {Is the {JCJ} voting system really coercion-resistant?},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/430},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/430}
}
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