Privacy, Identity and Trust in Electronic Voting Technologies

电子投票技术中的隐私、身份和信任

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-07170
• 负责人: Essex, Aleksander
• 金额: $ 2.99万
• 依托单位: University of Western Ontario
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=741638
• 关键词: Privacy; Identity; Trust; Electronic; Voting

This proposal addresses cybersecurity in the context of explosive interest and adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) into Canada's elections. Online voting, for example, is currently offered in almost half of Ontario's municipalities and expected to double by 2022. In October 2019, the Northwest Territories became the first sub-national election agency to offer online voting, and Quebec is currently holding a public consultation on this technology. Online voting is seen as a means of boosting voter turnout and engagement and building self-governance capacity in Indigenous nations. Despite this rapid growth and interest, however, no standards for online voting exist in Canada, and federal and provincial governments have warned of cybersecurity concerns. With the goal of providing Canada with a responsible path toward election ICT, the PI proposes to investigate cyber technologies that will protect the democratic process as we enter this new era of digital democracy. Elections as a cybersecurity design problem are highly constrained. Solutions must be inclusive to a highly diverse electorate, protect against an unusually broad threat landscape, and juggle the competing properties of ballot secrecy and public accountability. Developing ICT along these lines presents a unique research challenge requiring fundamentally novel techniques. The research objectives of this program will coincide with three pressing cybersecurity gaps in contemporary election ICT: trust, privacy, and identity. The trust objective of the proposed research program will focus on the technical challenge of providing an electorate with compelling, objectively verifiable evidence that an election result is correctly counted and reported. This will be accomplished through the design of novel techniques, algorithms, and protocols for cryptographic end-to-end verifiable internet voting (E2E-VIV), and the use of blockchains for specialized tasks such as automatic smart-contract based proof validation. The identity objective will tackle the broader issue of client-side security and voter eligibility to identify and demonstrate vulnerabilities in existing deployments to malware, phishing, cross-site scripting, and knowledge-based authentication. The privacy objective will focus on strengthening formal guarantees to ballot secrecy in connection with advances made under the confidence and identity objectives. This includes studying the privacy impact of existing confidence and identity ICT through the inter-disciplinary application of techniques such as re-identification risk from the health data privacy world. It will also explore the long-term privacy prospects of E2E-VIV proof transcripts through the development of post-quantum cryptographic techniques and protocols.

该提案解决了加拿大选举中信息和通信技术 (ICT) 受到爆炸性关注和采用的背景下的网络安全问题。例如，目前安大略省近一半的市镇都提供在线投票，预计到 2022 年将增加一倍。2019 年 10 月，西北地区成为第一个提供在线投票的地方选举机构，魁北克省目前正在举行公众咨询关于这项技术。在线投票被视为提高选民投票率和参与度以及建设原住民自治能力的一种手段。然而，尽管增长迅速且兴趣浓厚，但加拿大尚无在线投票标准，联邦和省政府已就网络安全问题发出警告。 为了给加拿大提供一条负责任的选举信息通信技术之路，PI 建议研究网络技术，以在我们进入数字民主的新时代时保护民主进程。选举作为网络安全设计问题受到高度限制。解决方案必须包容高度多样化的选民，防范异常广泛的威胁形势，并兼顾选票保密和公共问责制的相互竞争特性。沿着这些思路发展信息通信技术提出了独特的研究挑战，需要根本性的新技术。该项目的研究目标将与当代选举信息通信技术中三个紧迫的网络安全差距相一致：信任、隐私和身份。拟议研究计划的信任目标将侧重于向选民提供令人信服的、客观可验证的证据，证明选举结果得到正确计算和报告的技术挑战。这将通过设计用于加密端到端可验证互联网投票（E2E-VIV）的新技术、算法和协议，以及使用区块链执行专门任务（例如基于自动智能合约的证明验证）来实现。身份目标将解决更广泛的客户端安全和选民资格问题，以识别和演示现有部署中针对恶意软件、网络钓鱼、跨站点脚本和基于知识的身份验证的漏洞。隐私目标将侧重于加强与信任和身份目标下取得的进展有关的投票保密的正式保证。这包括通过跨学科应用技术（例如来自健康数据隐私领域的重新识别风险）来研究现有信心和身份信息通信技术对隐私的影响。它还将通过开发后量子密码技术和协议来探索 E2E-VIV 证明副本的长期隐私前景。