Enhanced Anonymous Credentials for E-Voting Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an augmentation to anonymous credential systems in e-voting that enhances voter-credential binding using perfectly hiding commitments, maintaining privacy while enabling verification and auditing.

Contribution

It introduces a simple method to strengthen voter-credential linkage without compromising privacy in e-voting systems.

Findings

Enhanced privacy preservation with stronger voter-credential binding

Maintains ballot unlinkability during voting and auditing

Supports consistency checks without revealing voter identities

Abstract

A simple and practical method for achieving everlasting privacy in e-voting systems, without relying on advanced cryptographic techniques, is to use anonymous voter credentials. The simplicity of this approach may, however, create some challenges, when combined with other security features, such as cast-as-intended verifiability with second device and second-factor authentication. This paper considers a simple augmentation to the anonymous credential mechanism, using perfectly hiding commitments to link such credentials to the voter identities. This solution strengthens the binding between voters and their credentials while preserving everlasting privacy. It ensures that published ballots remain unlinkable to voter identities, yet enables necessary consistency checks during ballot casting and ballot auditing