An Anonymous, Verifiable Internet Service POLL system

While there is a great number of electronic voting protocols proposed in the literature, only a handful of them are actually deployed. Still, these few available schemes require voters to completely trust the poll provider with the anonymity of their votes and/or the integrity of the results. More robust schemes with better privacy and integrity guarantees do exist, however, they are complex to deploy and, therefore, are not suitable for small to medium scale voting scenarios (e.g. electing the board of directors of an international society). In this paper, we present avisPoll, a practical electronic voting scheme that provides flexible anonymity as well as universal poll integrity validation. For this purpose, avisPoll relies on an anonymous credential system and other cryptographic building blocks. The system can be o↵ered as a cloud service which can give everybody the possibility to organize a poll and define the eligible voter set. Hence, the complexity of setting up a poll is significantly reduced without reducing privacy and integrity guarantees. Finally, we show a prototype implementation of avisPoll and give detailed performance results. These results demonstrate that the system is indeed practical for use, even on commodity hardware. For instance, it takes ⇡ 150 milliseconds for a client to cast a vote, and ⇡ 25 seconds for server to thoroughly verify 1000 votes. An Anonymous, Verifiable Internet Service POLL system Andreas Put, Italo Dacosta, Milica Milutinovic, Bart De Decker KU Leuven, Dept. of Computer Science, iMinds-DistriNet Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium [email protected]