What’s so hard about Internet voting?

Vanessa Teague (Stafford Tavares Lecture) (Thinking Cybersecurity and Australian National University)

22-Oct-2020, 00:00-01:00 (3 years ago)

Abstract: The first papers about electronic voting were written only a year or two after the invention of public key cryptography. It all seemed so simple: some voting codes, a mixnet or two, and we could have private and verifiable remote voting for everyone.

But the more we think about elections as a specific engineering problem, the more subtle problems appear. How do we ensure that people can’t sell their votes or be coerced into voting in a particular way? What if the voter’s computer sends a different vote from the one the voter wanted? How can independent auditors test for mistakes or manipulation? If the protocol assumes a separation of powers or a distribution of trust, how do we make those independence assumptions true in practice? What if we discover after the election that there was a bug in the maths?

I’ll survey the history of good ideas in the literature, and explain why recent examinations of real systems have identified problems that researchers didn’t even consider.

We’re learning something about democracy and security as we go, but unfortunately we’re mostly learning about the fragility of our democratic systems and the limitations of our clever cryptographic solutions.

I’ll conclude with some positive developments, including Risk-Limiting Audits and pollsite e-voting systems, and why I think those directions are more promising than paperless Internet voting.

cryptography and security

Audience: researchers in the discipline

( video )

Comments: Vanessa Teague is the CEO of Thinking Cybersecurity and Associate Prof (Adj.) in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. Her research focuses primarily on cryptographic methods for achieving security and privacy, particularly for issues of public interest such as election integrity and the protection of government data. She was part of the team (with Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein) who discovered the easy re-identification of doctors and patients in the Medicare/PBS open dataset released by the Australian Department of Health. She has co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland. She lives and works on Wurundjeri land in Southeastern Australia (near Melbourne).


Selected Areas in Cryptography 2020

Series comments: See the conference web page for more information about the program, registration, etc.

Organizers: Colin O'Flynn*, Orr Dunkelman, Michael Jacobson, Jr.*
*contact for this listing

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