Privacy, Identity and Trust in Electronic Voting Technologies

本提案解决了在加拿大选举中信息通信技术（ICT）的爆炸性兴趣和采用背景下的网络安全问题。例如，在线投票目前在安大略省几乎一半的城市提供，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，魁北克省目前正在就这项技术进行公众咨询。在线投票被视为提高土著民族选民投票率和参与度以及建立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过网络安全问题。为了给加拿大提供一条通向选举ICT的负责任道路，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是高度受限的。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形势，并兼顾投票保密性和公共问责制的竞争性。沿着这些路线发展信息通信技术提出了一个独特的研究挑战，需要从根本上新颖的技术。该计划的研究目标将与当代选举ICT中三个紧迫的网络安全缺口相吻合：信任、隐私和身份。拟议研究计划的信任目标将集中在为选民提供令人信服的、客观可验证的证据，证明选举结果是正确计算和报告的技术挑战上。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，以及将区块链用于诸如基于智能合约的自动证明验证等专门任务来实现。身份目标将解决客户端安全性和选民资格等更广泛的问题，以识别和展示现有部署中的恶意软件、网络钓鱼、跨站点脚本和基于知识的身份验证漏洞。隐私目标将集中于加强对根据信任和身份目标所作预付款的选票保密性的正式保证。这包括通过跨学科应用技术，如来自健康数据隐私领域的重新识别风险，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加密技术和协议，探索E2E-VIV证明转录本的长期隐私前景。

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.