Helios Verification: To Alleviate, or to Nominate: Is That the Question, or Shall we Have Both?

Abstract

Abstract. Helios is an end-to-end verifiable remote electronic voting system which has been used for elections in academic contexts. It allows voters to verify that their vote was cast, and included in the final tally, as intended. User studies have shown that voters are unlikely to perform this verification, probably due to the effortful and cumbersome manual steps that are required by the system. To address this challenge, we propose, in this paper, two improvements: the first is to ameliorate the cumbersome nature of the verification process as much as possible. We offer two suggestions for doing this. To accommodate voters who have no interest in verifying, we propose a further improvement: delegation. This will allow voters to nominate a trusted third party to perform the verification on their behalf as and when they cast their vote. Hence no extra effort is required, and we can exploit existing trust in public institutions to provide voters with the assurance that the voting process is indeed honest and above board. In addition to providing end-to-end verifiability in a less effortful manner, we provide stored as cast and tallied as stored verifiability as well, for voters who do not wish to verify their own votes.

Introducing Proxy Voting to Helios

“…For boardroom voting, an Android application extending and implementing the protocol behind Helios was developed [34]. From the usability perspective, a number of suggestions for the improvements of the current Helios implementation that simplify the audit process for the voters, have been proposed [35], [36].…”

SecIVo: a quantitative security evaluation framework for internet voting schemes

“…The Helios Scheme: Helios provides voters with the possibility to verify generated ballots in cut-and-choose manner and additionally to verify that cast votes have been stored in an unaltered manner on the voting server (VS ) (backend authority). Assuming that the voter verifies these two facts with a second device as implemented by Neumann et al [54], votes might be altered if both devices maliciously collaborate. Alternatively, if the VS issues malicious applications and the voter's verification device is compromised, votes might be altered undetectably.…”

Cast-as-intended-Verifizierbarkeit für das Polyas-Internetwahlsystem

“…Es soll hier erwähnt werden, dass durchaus Ansätze existieren, die diese iterative Cut-and-choose-Prüfung über unabhängige Geräte implementieren [17]. Der wesentliche Nachteil dieses Ansatzes ist die Komplexität der Prüfung und die Tatsache, dass eine derartige Prüfung auch über ein anderes Gerät durchgeführt werden soll.…”