Computing and Information Systems - Theses

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    Secure voter authentication for poll-site elections in developing countries
    Akinyokun, Olukayode Nicholas ( 2020)
    In the developing world, secure and privacy-preserving voter authentication remains one of the main challenges of poll-site election administration. Aside the unavailability of a robust and trustworthy national identity infrastructure, voter authentication in most developing countries has been largely undermined by different issues arising from multiple registration, polling booth capture, voter impersonation and vote buying, amongst others. This thesis will first describe how these issues play a role in compromising electoral integrity in developing countries. Next, it will present an end-to-end verifiable poll-site attendance verification protocol that has been designed to give voters, auditors and independent election observers the opportunity to detect voter impersonation and the ballot stuffing attacks mounted by colluding poll workers and dishonest election officials. For the second main contribution, the thesis will extensively discuss the cryptographic techniques that are employed in a novel three-factor voter authentication protocol which is intended to disincentivise voter impersonation, vote buying, registration fraud and identity theft. In particular, by drawing on the unique security properties of fuzzy extractors and anonymous credentials, this authentication protocol not only ensures that voter credentials are non-transferable, but also provide election officials with efficient mechanisms to revoke questionable credentials that could be used for multiple voting. Finally, we describe the results obtained from the formal modelling and verification of the designed protocols using the Tamarin prover. The symbolic analysis carried out shows that the two protocols satisfy the notion of participation privacy, if voters are honest.