[EM] PhD Thesis on voting schemes (FWD)

[DEMOREP1 at aol.com]

Mr. Jorba's effort----
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Dear all,


I have successfully completed a doctorate in Computer Science.

My research work has focused in secure large scale voting schemes.


The PhD Thesis is entitled "Design of implementable solutions

for large scale electronic voting schemes". The Thesis can be

downloaded from my homepage at


http://ccd.uab.es/~andreu/indexenglish.shtml


both as a PostScript file (3 MBytes) and a gziped PostScript file

(400 Kbytes).


Next, I include the abstract of the Thesis to allow a quick look

at its contents.


ABSTRACT:


The aim of an electronic voting scheme is to conduct secure elections

over general-purpose and open computer networks. To achieve security

in such an unsecure environment, the voting system has to be designed

by accurately combining a number of cryptographic tools and protocols.

In this thesis, we propose practical solutions to the currently most

serious open problems concerning the design of secure voting schemes,

in particular when large numbers of voters are involved. All these

solutions are mainly devised to allow an easy implementation.


In order to perform large scale electronic elections, a number of

distributed electronic electoral colleges have to be operated

concurrently. This creates the need for a set of coordination

mechanisms and protocols. In this thesis, we define various types of

voting authorities, each one of these with a differentiate role, and

we propose a hierarchical model that links them and that efficiently

solves the coordination problems. We offer a practical solution to

the implementation of a large and distributed electoral roll.


To achieve anonymity in the election, we use the mobile agents paradigm

to mix ballot boxes at the tallying phase, when all (enveloped) ballots

are already cast. This approach avoids the usual and (from the practical

point of view) annoying use of anonymous channels to cast the ballots.

In addition, we offer mechanisms to assure the accuracy of the tally and

to prevent the publication of intermediate results before the election is

completed.


Electronic elections are specially prone to suffer from coercion because

voters usually have the ability to prove their respective voting

strategies. In this thesis, we propose a technique to prevent massive

coercion in large scale voting schemes. Our solution is based on the use

of tamper-proof smartcards by voters. The main advantage over previous

proposals is that we do not restrict the mobility of voters.


Finally, in this thesis we improve previous methods of allowing open

(public) objection to the tally if some inaccuracies are detected when

the election results are published. The classical vote-tag model is

normally used to achieve this goal. However, its implementation leads

to ballot casting protocols inconvenient for voters. We offer an

efficient alternative to construct vote-tags, improving the computation

costs of previous proposals. This makes our solution the first

implementable method to allow open objection to the tally.




Andreu

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Andreu Riera Jorba

Dept. Informàtica

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

08193 BELLATERRA (BCN)

Catalonia - Spain


Phone# +34 93 581 1777

Fax#   +34 93 581 3033

E-mail ariera at ccd.uab.es

WWW    http://ccd.uab.es/~andreu


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