Election Verifiability in Electronic Voting Protocols

We present a formal, symbolic definition of election verifiability for electronic voting protocols in the context of the applied pi calculus. Our definition is given in terms of boolean tests which can be performed on the data produced by an election. The definition distinguishes three aspects of verifiability: individual, universal and eligibility verifiability. It also allows us to determine precisely which aspects of the system’s hardware and software must be trusted for the purpose of election verifiability. In contrast with earlier work our definition is compatible with a large class of electronic voting schemes, including those based on blind signatures, homomorphic encryption and mixnets. We demonstrate the applicability of our formalism by analysing three protocols: FOO, Helios 2.0, and Civitas (the latter two have been deployed).