D-DEMOS: A distributed, end-to-end verifiable, internet voting system

TL;DR

D-DEMOS is a distributed, privacy-preserving, end-to-end verifiable internet voting system that ensures election integrity and voter privacy even with potentially unsafe client environments, using a fully asynchronous vote collection and fault-tolerant bulletin board.

Contribution

This paper introduces D-DEMOS, the first human-verifiable e-voting system that maintains privacy and verifiability with distributed components and supports large-scale elections.

Findings

System can handle large-scale elections efficiently.

Voter privacy is preserved even with unsafe web clients.

Election integrity is verifiable through distributed components.

Abstract

E-voting systems have emerged as a powerful technology for improving democracy by reducing election cost, increasing voter participation, and even allowing voters to directly verify the entire election procedure. Prior internet voting systems have single points of failure, which may result in the compromise of availability, voter secrecy, or integrity of the election results. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, security analysis, and evaluation of D-DEMOS, a complete e-voting system that is distributed, privacy-preserving and end-to-end verifiable. Our system includes a fully asynchronous vote collection subsystem that provides immediate assurance to the voter her vote was recorded as cast, without requiring cryptographic operations on behalf of the voter. We also include a distributed, replicated and fault-tolerant Bulletin Board component, that stores all necessary election-related information, and allows any party to read and verify the complete election process. Finally, we also incorporate trustees, i.e., individuals who control election result production while guaranteeing privacy and end-to-end-verifiability as long as their strong majority is honest. Our system is the first e-voting system whose voting operation is human verifiable, i.e., a voter can vote over the web, even when her web client stack is potentially unsafe, without sacrificing her privacy, and still be assured her vote was recorded as cast. Additionally, a voter can outsource election auditing to third parties, still without sacrificing privacy. Finally, as the number of auditors increases, the probability of election fraud going undetected is diminished exponentially. We provide a model and security analysis of the system. We implement a prototype of the complete system, we measure its performance experimentally, and we demonstrate its ability to handle large-scale elections.