SoK: Secure E-Voting with Everlasting Privacy

ABSTRACT

Vote privacy is a fundamental right, which needs to be protected

not only during an election, or for a limited time afterwards, but

for the foreseeable future. Numerous electronic voting (e-voting)

protocols have been proposed to address this challenge, striving

for everlasting privacy. This property guarantees that even computationally unbounded adversaries cannot break privacy of past

elections.

The broad interest in secure e-voting with everlasting privacy has

spawned a large variety of protocols over the last three decades.

These protocols differ in many aspects, in particular the precise

security properties they aim for, the threat scenarios they consider,

and the privacy-preserving techniques they employ. Unfortunately,

these differences are often opaque, making analysis and comparison

cumbersome.

In order to overcome this non-transparent state of affairs, we systematically analyze all e-voting protocols designed to provide everlasting privacy. First, we illustrate the relations and dependencies

between all these different protocols. Next, we analyze in depth

which protocols do provide secure and efficient approaches to evoting with everlasting privacy under realistic assumptions, and

which ones do not. Eventually, based on our extensive and detailed

treatment, we identify which research problems in this field have

already been solved, and which ones are still open.

Altogether, our work offers a well-founded reference point for conducting research on secure e-voting with everlasting privacy as well

as for future-proofing privacy in real-world electronic elections