NDLI: A Peered Bulletin Board for Robust Use in Verifiable Voting Systems

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Culnane, C. Schneider, S.
Copyright Year	2014
Description	Author affiliation: Dept. of Comput., Univ. of Surrey, Guildford, UK (Culnane, C.; Schneider, S.)
Abstract	The Secure Web Bulletin Board (WBB) is a key component of verifiable election systems. However, there is very little in the literature on their specification, design and implementation, and there are no formally analysed designs. The WBB is used in the context of election verification to publish evidence of voting and tallying that voters and officials can check, and where challenges can be launched in the event of malfeasance. In practice, the election authority has responsibility for implementing the web bulletin board correctly and reliably, and will wish to ensure that it behaves correctly even in the presence of failures and attacks. To ensure robustness, an implementation will typically use a number of peers to be able to provide a correct service even when some peers go down or behave dishonestly. In this paper we propose a new protocol to implement such a Web Bulletin Board, motivated by the needs of the vVote verifiable voting system. Using a distributed algorithm increases the complexity of the protocol and requires careful reasoning in order to establish correctness. Here we use the Event-B modelling and refinement approach to establish correctness of the peered design against an idealised specification of the bulletin board behaviour. In particular we have shown that for n peers, a threshold of t > 2n/3 peers behaving correctly is sufficient to ensure correct behaviour of the bulletin board distributed design. The algorithm also behaves correctly even if honest or dishonest peers temporarily drop out of the protocol and then return. The verification approach also establishes that the protocols used within the bulletin board do not interfere with each other. This is the first time a peered secure web bulletin board suite of protocols has been formally verified.
Starting Page	169
Ending Page	183
File Size	259968
Page Count	15
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781479942909
ISSN	10636900
DOI	10.1109/CSF.2014.20
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2014-07-19
Publisher Place	Austria
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Context Protocols Databases Publishing Event-B Nominations and elections Secure Web Bulletin Board Robustness Verification Cryptography Verifiable Voting Protocols Formal Modelling
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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