$Laoco\ddot{o}n$: Scalable and Portable Receipt-free E-voting Protocol without Untappable Channels

TL;DR

Laoco extperiodcentered{}n is a scalable, practical, and lightweight cryptographic e-voting protocol that defends against vote-buying without relying on untappable channels, suitable for large-scale online elections.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, practical e-voting protocol using proxy re-encryption, eliminating the need for untappable channels and reducing computational complexity.

Findings

Protocol is secure against vote-buying attacks.

Achieves candidate-adaptiveness for real-time vote counts.

Experimental results demonstrate efficiency and scalability.

Abstract

Vote-buying and voter-coercion are the impending threats when deploying remote online voting into large scale elections. With a policy of carrot and stick, it will encourage voters to deviate from honest voting strategy and spoil the democratic election. To deal with this problem, many voting protocols proposed their solutions with the notion of receipt-freeness. However, existing receipt-free voting protocols either rely on some impractical assumptions as untappable communication channel, or are burden with heavy voter-side computation and quadratic tallying complexity. In this paper, we present $Laoco\ddot{o}n$, a brand new cryptographic voting protocol which is practical and light-weight to be deployed in large scale online elections. By taking advantage of proxy re-encryption, our protocol can defend vote-buying attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a new property, candidate-adaptiveness, in electronic voting which refers to as every candidate knows the real-time vote number towards himself, while he knows nothing about others, nor he buys votes. We prove the correctness of our protocol and evaluate the performance with experimental results. Finally we advance some open problems which will be coped in our future work.