Kairos: a P2P End-To-End verifiable voting system framework

Abstract

End-to-end verifiable voting systems are commonly based on the security offered by cryptographic operations. Popular voting systems make use of cryptosystems like ElGamal which allows to anonymize votes both through Mix Networks (MixNet) and homomorphic encryption. We propose Kairos, a new voting framework partially based on Helios, that groups features of popular voting systems. Remote voting systems like Helios are based on the assumption of a trusted server, in which decryption keys are only used in an intended, secure way. Kairos, instead, implements a peer-to-peer approach that relaxes this assumption and prevents votes to be decrypted and associated to voters even when a subset of the servers are corrupted. Kairos is fully configurable in terms of cryptosystems and protocols. Additionally, it implements a new form of ElGamal decryption-reencryption MixNets that, to the best of our knowledge, have not appeared previously in the literature.