Automated Verification of Star-Vote in the Applied Pi Calculus

Abstract

Security protocols form the backbone of our modern digital society. Voting is one of the most important activities in modern democratic world. Recently proposed Star-vote voting system claims to satisfy some crucial electronic voting protocol properties. In this work, we analyze properties of Star-vote electronic voting system. We are interested in privacy, fairness and eligibility properties. Intuitively, an electronic voting protocol ensures privacy if the link between voter and his vote remains secret. Fairness property holds if no partial election results can be obtained which can influence the remaining voters. Eligibility property holds if only registered voters can vote. We used proverif to prove these properties hold. To our knowledge we are conducting first automated analysis of privacy, fairness and eligibility properties of Star-vote voting system in presence of authorities behave as intruder. Ultimately, this work will help to avoid the current situation whereby many electronic voting protocols are purposed and deployed, and does not satisfy basic security property and found to be insecure.