Proving Prêt à Voter Receipt Free Using Computational Security Models

peer reviewedPret a Voter is a supervised, end-to-end verifiable voting scheme. Informal analyses indicate that, subject to certain assumptions, Pret a Voter is receipt free, i.e. a voter has no way to construct a proof to a coercer of how she voted. In this paper we propose a variant of Pret a Voter and prove receipt freeness of this scheme using computational methods. Our proof shows that if there exists an adversary that breaks receipt freeness of the scheme then there exists an adversary that breaks the IND-CCA2 security of the Naor-Yung encryption scheme. We propose a security model that defines receipt freeness based on the indistinguishability of receipts. We show that in order to simulate the game we require an IND-CCA2 encryption scheme to create the ballots and receipts. We show that, within our model, a non-malleable onion is sufficient to guarantee receipt freeness. Most of the existing Pret a Voter schemes do not employ IND-CCA2 encryption in the construction of the ballots, but they avoid such attacks by various additional mechanisms such as pre-commitment of ballot material to the bulletin board, digitally signed ballots etc. Our use of the Naor-Yung transformation provides the IND-CCA2 security required.SerTV