Votemind: Using Sharemind for Privacy and Verifiability in Internet Voting

Abstract

Electronic voting (e-voting) has been replacing traditional voting because it can automate the counting process of ballots. A type of e-voting – Internet voting – enables the voter to vote from home which increases voter turnout. In order for an I-voting system to be considered secure, it must satisfy both privacy and verifiability. A problem with most I-voting systems is that it usually trusts a third party to store and compute the votes, which risks the privacy and verifiabilty of the votes if that party becomes malicious. Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) protocols can be implemented to meet these requirements by removing the need of trusting a third party. It achieves this by using multiple parties to do the storing and computing. Sharemind is a framework for SMC that can be used to create a secure I-voting system. This was done in Piscos’ work, but her system still trusts in an intermediary web server which must be trusted. Talviste proposed an architecture that eliminates the need for the intermediary web server. This architecture uses a Javascript library that can split the data at the source. With the use of Sharemind 3 and the Javascript library, we created Votemind, which is an improvement of the Internet voting system of Piscos.