This paper explores the interaction between receipt- freeness and cast-as-intended verifiability, a property that has been overlooked until now or assumed to be granted through procedural means in the context of receipt-free voting protocols.We first demonstrate that it is impossible to obtain a receipt-free voting protocol with cast-as-intended verifiability if the voting process is non-interactive, unless a trusted authority is available. We also demonstrate that, if a trusted voter registration authority is available, then cast-as-intended verifiability and receipt-freeness can be obtained.Furthermore, after extending standard receipt-freeness security definitions to an interactive voting (and corruption) setting, we demonstrate that the same security properties can be obtained using an interactive voting process.Finally, we discuss the performance of our protocols based on a prototype implementation.

32-bit software implementations become increasingly popular for embedded security applications. As a result, profiling 32-bit target intermediate values becomes increasingly needed to evaluate their side-channel security. This implies the need of statistical tools that can deal with long traces and large number of classes. While there are good options to solve these issues separately (e.g., linear regression and linear discriminant analysis), the current state of the art lacks efficient tools to solve them jointly. To the best of our knowledge, the best-known option is to fragment the profiling in smaller parts, which is suboptimal from the information theoretic viewpoint. In this paper, we therefore revisit regression-based linear discriminant analysis, which combines linear regression and linear discriminant analysis, and improve its efficiency so that it can be used for profiling long traces corresponding to 32-bit implementations. Besides introducing the optimizations needed for this purpose, we show how to use regression-based linear discriminant analysis in order to obtain efficient bounds for the perceived information, an information theoretic metric characterizing the security of an implementation against profiled attacks. We also combine this tool with optimizations of soft analytical side-channel attack that apply to bitslice implementations. We use these results to attack a 32-bit implementation of SAP instantiated with Ascon’s permutation, and show that breaking the initialization of its re-keying in one trace is feasible for determined adversaries.

CCA-like game-based security definitions capture confidentiality by asking an adversary to distinguish between honestly computed encryptions of chosen plaintexts. In the context of voting systems, such guarantees have been shown to be sufficient to prove ballot privacy (Asiacrypt'12). In this paper, we observe that they fall short when one seeks to obtain receipt-freeness, that is, when corrupted voters who submit chosen ciphertexts encrypting their vote must be prevented from proving how they voted to a third party. Since no known encryption security notion can lead to a receipt-free ballot submission process, we address this challenge by proposing a novel publicly verifiable encryption primitive coined Traceable Receipt-free Encryption (TREnc) and a new notion of traceable CCA security filling the definitional gap underlined above. We propose two TREnc instances, one generic achieving stronger guarantees for the purpose of relating it to existing building blocks, and a dedicated one based on SXDH. Both support the encryption of group elements in the standard model, while previously proposed encryption schemes aiming at offering receipt-freeness only support a polynomialsize message space, or security in the generic group model. Eventually, we demonstrate how a TREnc can be used to build receiptfree protocols, by following a standard blueprint.

32-bit software implementations become increasingly popular for embedded security applications. As a result, profiling 32-bit target intermediate values becomes increasingly needed to evaluate their side-channel security. This implies the need of statistical tools that can deal with long traces and large number of classes. While there are good options to solve these issues separately (e.g., linear regression and linear discriminant analysis), the current state of the art lacks efficient tools to solve them jointly. To the best of our knowledge, the best-known option is to fragment the profiling in smaller parts, which is suboptimal from the information theoretic viewpoint. In this paper, we therefore revisit regression-based linear discriminant analysis, which combines linear regression and linear discriminant analysis, and improve its efficiency so that it can be used for profiling long traces corresponding to 32-bit implementations. Besides introducing the optimizations needed for this purpose, we show how to use regression-based linear discriminant analysis in order to obtain efficient bounds for the perceived information, an information theoretic metric characterizing the security of an implementation against profiled attacks. We also combine this tool with optimizations of soft analytical side-channel attack that apply to bitslice implementations. We use these results to attack a 32-bit implementation of SAP instantiated with Ascon’s permutation, and show that breaking the initialization of its re-keying in one trace is feasible for determined adversaries.

The verifiable encryption of bits is the main computational step that is needed to prepare ballots in many practical voting protocols. Its computational load can also be a practical bottleneck, preventing the deployment of some protocols or requiring the use of computing clusters. We investigate the question of producing many verifiably encrypted bits in an efficient and portable way, using as a baseline the protocol that is in use in essentially all modern voting systems and libraries supporting homomorphic voting, including ElectionGuard, a state-of-the-art open source voting SDK deployed in government elections. Combining fixed base exponentiation techniques and new encryption and ZK proof mechanisms, we obtain speed-ups by more than one order of magnitude against standard implementations. Our exploration requires balancing conflicting optimization strategies, and the use of asymptotically less efficient protocols that turn out to be very effective in practice. Several of our proposed improvements are now on the ElectionGuard roadmap.

We study the problem of evacuating two agents from a tree graph, through an unknown exit located at one of the nodes. Initially, the agents are located at the same starting node; they explore the graph until one of them finds the exit through which they can evacuate. The task is to minimize the time it takes until both agents evacuate, for a worst case placement of the exit. We consider two communication models, global communication where the agents can communicate at any time, and local communication where the agents can only communicate if they are at the same node at the same time. We show that the problem is NP-hard in both cases. We then present a 4/3-approximation algorithm for global and a 3/2-approximation algorithm for local communication.