Estonian Internet voting with anonymous credentials

Authors: İSA SERTKAYA, PETER ROENNE, PETER Y. A. RYAN

Abstract: The Estonian Internet voting (EIV) scheme is a unique example of a long-term nation-wide, legally binding electronic voting deployment. The EIV scheme is used in parallel with standard paper-based election day voting, of course invalidating an already cast i-vote. This necessarily requires careful authentication of the eligible voters and makes the Estonian identity card solution a crucial part of the scheme, however, note that Parsovs has recently drawn attention to the security flaws found in Estonian ID-cards. In this study, we propose an e-voting scheme EIV-AC that integrates the EIV scheme with anonymous credentials based on self-sovereign identity. In addition to the EIV scheme's security properties, the EIV-AC scheme further supports participation privacy, i.e. whether or not an eligible voter has participated in an election is kept hidden - also from the election authorities.

Keywords: Electronic voting, e-voting, Estonian Internet voting, privacy, anonymous credentials, self-sovereign identity, distributed ledger technologies

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