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: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=752093
• 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.

该提案涉及在加拿大选举中对信息和通信技术（信通技术）的爆炸性兴趣和采用的背景下的网络安全。例如，在线投票目前在安大略近一半的城市提供，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进行公众咨询。在线投票被视为提高选民投票率和参与度以及建设土著民族自治能力的一种手段。然而，尽管这种快速增长和兴趣，加拿大没有在线投票的标准，联邦和省政府已经警告网络安全问题。 为了向加拿大提供一条负责任的选举信息通信技术之路，PI建议调查网络技术，以保护我们进入数字民主新时代的民主进程。选举作为一个网络安全设计问题受到高度限制。解决方案必须对高度多样化的选民具有包容性，防范异常广泛的威胁环境，并兼顾选票保密和公共问责的相互竞争的性质。沿着这些路线发展信息和通信技术提出了一个独特的研究挑战，需要从根本上创新的技术。该计划的研究目标将与当代选举ICT中的三个紧迫的网络安全差距相吻合：信任，隐私和身份。拟议的研究计划的信任目标将集中在为选民提供令人信服的，客观可核实的证据，证明选举结果是正确计算和报告的技术挑战。这将通过设计加密端到端可验证互联网投票（E2 E-VIV）的新技术、算法和协议，以及使用区块链来完成特定任务，例如基于智能合约的自动证明验证。身份目标将解决客户端安全和选民资格的更广泛问题，以识别和展示现有部署中的漏洞，以防止恶意软件，网络钓鱼，跨站点脚本和基于知识的身份验证。隐私权目标将侧重于结合在信任和身份目标方面取得的进展，加强对选票保密的正式保障。这包括研究现有的信心和身份信息和通信技术的隐私影响，通过跨学科的应用技术，如重新识别健康数据隐私世界的风险。它还将通过后量子加密技术和协议的发展，探索E2 E-VIV证明转录本的长期隐私前景。