Farid Javani
CSEE Department
UMBC
12:00noon–1pm
Friday, November 6, 2020
remotely via WebEx: umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman
A recording of the talk can be found here.
Abstract:
A boardroom election is an election with a small number of voters carried out with public communications. We present BVOT, a self-tallying boardroom voting protocol with ballot secrecy, fairness (no tally information is available before the polls close), and dispute-freeness (voters can observe that all voters correctly followed the protocol).
BVOT works by using a multiparty threshold homomorphic encryption system in which each candidate is associated with a masked unique prime. Each voter engages in an oblivious transfer with an untrusted distributor: the voter selects the index of a prime associated with a candidate and receives the selected prime in a masked form. The voter then casts their vote by encrypting their masked prime and broadcasting it to everyone. The distributor does not learn the voter’s choice, and no one learns the mapping between primes and candidates until the audit phase. By hiding the mapping between primes and candidates, BVOT provides voters with insufficient information to carry out effective cheating. The threshold feature prevents anyone from computing any partial tally—until everyone has voted. Multiplying all votes, their decryption shares, and the unmasking factor yields a product of the primes each raised to the number of votes received.
In contrast to some existing boardroom voting protocols, BVOT does not rely on any zero-knowledge proof; instead, it uses oblivious transfer to assure ballot secrecy and correct vote casting. Also, BVOT can handle multiple candidates in one election. BVOT prevents cheating by hiding crucial information: an attempt to increase the tally of one candidate might increase the tally of another candidate. After all votes are cast, any party can tally the votes.
URL to paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.02421.pdf
About the Speaker:
Farid Javani is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at UMBC, working with Alan Sherman. His research
interests include algorithms, security, applied cryptography, and distributed systems. He is the manager of the Enterprise Architecture
team at CCC Information Services in Chicago.
Email: javani1@umbc.edu
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farid-javani-68118741/
Host:
Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu
Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.