Paper 2025/841
Verifiable E-Voting with a Trustless Bulletin Board
, University of Stuttgart, University of Stuttgart, University of StuttgartAbstract
Voter privacy and end-to-end (E2E) verifiability are critical features of electronic voting (e-voting) systems to safeguard elections. To achieve these properties commonly a perfect bulletin board (BB) is assumed that provides consistent, reliable, and tamper-proof storage and transmission of voting data. However, in practice, BBs operate in asynchronous and unreliable networks, and hence, are susceptible to vulnerabilities such as equivocation attacks and dropped votes, which can compromise both verifiability and privacy. Although prior research has weakened the perfect BB assumption, it still depends on trusting certain BB components. In this work, we present and initiate a formal exploration of designing e-voting systems based on fully untrusted BBs. For this purpose, we leverage the notion of accountability and in particular use accountable BBs. Accountability ensures that if a security breach occurs, then cryptographic evidence can identify malicious parties. Fully untrusted BBs running in asynchronous networks bring new challenges. Among others, we identify several types of attacks that a malicious but accountable BB might be able to perform and propose a new E2E verifiability notion for this setting. Based on this notion and as a proof of concept, we construct the first e-voting system that is provably E2E verifiable and provides vote privacy even when the underlying BB is fully malicious. This establishes an alternative to traditional e-voting architectures that rely on (threshold) trusted BB servers.
Note: This is the full version of the paper that has been accepted to appear at IEEE CSF 2025.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Major revision. CSF 2025 - 38th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium
- Keywords
- E-VotingAccountabilityBulletin Board
- Contact author(s)
-
daniel rausch @ sec uni-stuttgart de
nicolas huber @ sec uni-stuttgart de
ralf kuesters @ sec uni-stuttgart de - History
- 2025-05-13: approved
- 2025-05-12: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/841
- License
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CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/841,
author = {Daniel Rausch and Nicolas Huber and Ralf Kuesters},
title = {Verifiable E-Voting with a Trustless Bulletin Board},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/841},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/841}
}
