They devise a new electronic voting system resistant to computer attacks

Within the purely electronic voting systems, four large groups can be distinguished: those that use blind signatures to protect the vote; those who use homomorphic cryptography to gather votes without knowing their content; those that use ring signatures to protect the identity of the user; and, finally, those based on blockchain technology to ensure that the process is public and decentralized. All of these options make use of vote encryption and, because of this, any current or future attack that could be made on the encryption protocols would imply a weakness and would put the privacy of the electorate at risk.

In Spain, a team from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), belonging to the Valencian University Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence (VRAIN), has devised an electronic voting system that does not require encryption and ensures privacy at all times. of the voters.

“The system that we have developed involves all the agents in an election as guarantors of the vote, receiving fragments of the ballots issued from the voters, being incapable of revealing the direction of the vote and having to collaborate in the reconstruction of each ballot. . The protocol guarantees that all people can verify, once the tally is published, that the votes were counted in the sense in which they were cast”, explains Damián López, a researcher at the VRAIN Institute of the UPV.

In addition, the UPV VRAIN Institute system complies with two essential properties for electronic voting: it guarantees that a voter cannot vote more than once and it ensures that the election result is fair without compromising the individual privacy of voters.

Damian Lopez. (Photo: Vicente Lara Saez / UPV)

“Regardless of the computational power available, it is impossible to guess what the vote has been, even in a post-quantum scenario. Our system guarantees the security, verifiability and auditability of the results at all times, without compromising the electorate at any time”, emphasizes Damián López.

Regarding its implementation, the UPV researcher assures that the system has already been formally tested and could be prepared to go into service. (Source: UPV)