A look at the electronic voting systems

Title of the Talk:A look at the electronic voting systems
Speaker: Dr.Souradyuti Paul
Host Faculty: Dr.Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram
Date: January 31, 2025
Time: 12:00 to 1:00 pm
Venue: EE Seminar Hall, Ground Floor, EECS Building.

Overview

Any secure voting system should demonstrate at least four properties. P1: The voter should remain anonymous. That is to say that it is hard to tie the voter to the vote she cast. P2: A voter should not be able to cast a vote more than once. P3: A voter should be able to convince herself that her vote has been counted as cast. P4: When challenged by an honest or dishonest voter, the Election Authority (EA) should be able to prove to the voter that her voter has indeed been counted as cast.

Interestingly, these four properties do not talk to each other. Which means that making one property stronger makes the other property weaker, at least, intuitively. For example, the cover of anonymity could be used by a voter to cast a vote multiple times under the apparent impression that her misdeeds could not be detected. Similarly, the cover of anonymity allows a dishonest voter to sabotage the voting system with the false claim that her vote has not been counted. The problem is even more challenging when none of the voters, as well the Election Authority (EA), are trusted.

We discuss these challenges in detail, and make an attempt to give a solution. Our solution critically uses sophisticated cryptographic algorithms such as Linkable Ring Signature (LRS), and of course Blockchain. Even then we encounter hurdles which are difficult to overcome. We conclude with certain open questions.

Bio:

Dr. Souradyuti Paul is currently the Department Head and an associate professor in the department of CSE of IIT Bhilai. Earlier, he worked as an assistant professor of CSE at IIT Gandhinagar (Jul. 2014 - Oct. 17). He obtained BE, MTech and PhD degrees, respectively, from Jadavpur University (1994 - 98), Indian Statistical Institute (1999 - 01) and KU Leuven (2001 - 06). He spent a long span of time (about 14 years) working as a doctoral, postdoctoral and a guest researcher at various prestigious data security research groups in Europe, USA, and Canada: in KU Leuven (2001 - 08), at NIST/USA (2008 - 12) and in the Univ. of Waterloo (2012 - 14). In addition to carrying out academic research in computer security, he was, in the past, directly involved with (and a major technical contributor to) two cryptographic standardization projects of global impact: ECRYPT-eSTREAM (organized by the European Union, 2005-2008) and SHA-3 (organized by NIST, Govt. of USA, 2007-2012). He led multiple Indian initiatives (undertaken by the Bureau of Indian Standards) in standardizing Blockchain-based applications under various ISO projects. Among others, currently, he is the Chief Coordinator of a Dantewada District Development Design project funded by the Dantewada District Administration, a Coordinator of the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) project funded by the Govt. of Chhattisgarh, and a Principal Investigator of the GI-tag-based trading platform funded by IBITF.