Coercion-resistant Internet voting made practical

Internet voting offers a better voting experience since voters can cast their votes from their computers or even smartphones. By eliminating the need to visit polling places, it may attract more voters and thus increase voter turnout. However, it is still not widely spread owing to many inherent concerns such as risks entailed by the lack of private polling booths. Indeed, this may ease coercion and vote-buying attacks. Consequently, electronic voting schemes ought to address this issue that remained a challenge for many years. In this talk, we will present a practical approach for constructing coercion-resistant and ‘end-to-end verifiable’ electronic voting protocols suitable for real elections. Our construction relies on voting credentials generated thanks to a recent algebraic Message Authentication Code (MAC) scheme due to Chase et al. To enable multiple elections and credentials revocation, we will also introduce a novel sequential aggregate MAC scheme. We will conclude our presentation with a discussion of ongoing research in the area of remote voting.