key: 2017-secrecy-verifiability-elections-tutorial
type: techreport
title: A short introduction to secrecy and verifiability for elections
authors:
  - Elizabeth A. Quaglia
  - Ben Smyth
year: 2018
month: 9
number: "1702.03168"
institution: arXiv
description: This paper presents a tutorial-style introduction to secrecy and verifiability for elections.
keywords: voting, verifiability, secrecy, privacy, election system, electronic voting, e-voting
abstract: >-
  We explore the fundamental properties that are necessary to ensure that election schemes behave as
  expected. The exploration reveals how our understanding of those expectations has evolved,
  culminating in the emergence of formal definitions of properties necessary to fulfil expectations.
  We provide insights into definitions of secrecy and verifiability, allowing us to learn and
  appreciate the underlying intuition and technical details of these notions.<br/> Equipped with
  definitions, we can build election schemes that can be proven to behave as expected. And, as an
  illustrative example, we review a variant of the Helios election system that was built and proven
  secure, in this way. Furthermore, the definitions can be used to analyse existing election
  schemes, and vulnerabilities have been uncovered. Indeed, we describe a series of vulnerabilities
  that were discovered during the analysis of the original Helios system, which advanced our
  understanding of system behaviour and prompted the design of the aforementioned variant.<br/>
  Thus, this article contributes to the science of security by sharing valuable insights into
  elections, and demonstrating the value that formal definitions and analysis have in building
  schemes guaranteed to behave as expected.
links:
  - file: Smyth17-secrecy-verifiability-elections-tutorial.pdf
    text: Draft
    alt:
      url: http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03168
      text: arXiv version