Privacy, Identity and Trust in Electronic Voting Technologies

这项提案在加拿大选举中引起了人们的极大兴趣和采用信息和通信技术的背景下解决了网络安全问题。例如，目前安大略省几乎一半的市政当局都提供在线投票，预计到2022年将翻一番。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，魁北克目前正在就这项技术举行公众咨询。在线投票被视为在土著国家提高选民投票率和参与度以及建设自治能力的一种手段。然而，尽管这种快速增长和兴趣，在线投票在加拿大没有标准，联邦和省级政府已经就网络安全问题发出了警告。 为了给加拿大提供一条通往选举ICT的负责任的道路，PI提议调查将在我们进入数字民主的新时代时保护民主进程的网络技术。选举作为一个网络安全设计问题受到了高度限制。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，并兼顾投票保密和公共问责这两个相互竞争的属性。沿着这些路线发展信息和通信技术是一项独特的研究挑战，需要从根本上创新的技术。该项目的研究目标将与当代选举ICT中三个紧迫的网络安全差距相吻合：信任、隐私和身份。 拟议研究方案的信任目标将侧重于向选民提供令人信服的、客观可核实的证据，证明选举结果得到正确统计和报告的技术挑战。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，以及将区块链用于基于自动智能合同的证据验证等专门任务来实现。身份目标将解决更广泛的客户端安全和选民资格问题，以识别和展示恶意软件、网络钓鱼、跨站点脚本和基于知识的身份验证的现有部署中的漏洞。隐私目标将侧重于加强正式保证投票保密，这与在信心和身份目标下取得的进展有关。这包括研究现有信心和身份信息和通信技术对隐私的影响，方法是跨学科地应用技术，例如重新识别健康数据隐私领域的风险。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。

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.