Using mobile device communication to strengthen e-Voting protocols.

ABSTRACTRemote e-voting protocols strive to achieve sophisticated security properties. However, the inherent complexity of this level of sophistication typically comes at a cost: Protocols must either accept trade-offs in terms of security or are impractical. In this paper, we show how the additional communication capabilities given by the pervasive availability of mobile phones today can be used to strengthen the security offered by remote e-voting protocols. More precisely, the presence of two separate channels between the voter and the election authorities, namely the possibility for voters to communicate with authorities using both their computers and their mobile phones, opens up useful possibilities to significantly improve the security of remote e-voting with little cost in practicality. We discuss three mobile building blocks that can be plugged into many existing protocols from the literature, and that yield important security properties such as eligibility, resistance against impersonation attacks, inalterability, vote independence and coercion resistance, and even privacy and integrity of votes in the presence of malicious computers, under realistic assumptions.