Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in
Menu
Find a journal Publish with us Track your research
Search
Saved research
Cart
  1. Home
  2. Programming Languages and Systems
  3. Conference paper

Analysis of an Electronic Voting Protocol in the Applied Pi Calculus

  • Conference paper
  • pp 186–200
  • Cite this conference paper
Save conference paper
View saved research
Programming Languages and Systems (ESOP 2005)
Analysis of an Electronic Voting Protocol in the Applied Pi Calculus
  • Steve Kremer17 &
  • Mark Ryan18 

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3444))

Included in the following conference series:

  • European Symposium on Programming
  • 2073 Accesses

  • 135 Citations

  • 3 Altmetric

Abstract

Electronic voting promises the possibility of a convenient, efficient and secure facility for recording and tallying votes in an election. Recently highlighted inadequacies of implemented systems have demonstrated the importance of formally verifying the underlying voting protocols. The applied pi calculus is a formalism for modelling such protocols, and allows us to verify properties by using automatic tools, and to rely on manual proof techniques for cases that automatic tools are unable to handle. We model a known protocol for elections known as FOO 92 in the applied pi calculus, and we formalise three of its expected properties, namely fairness, eligibility, and privacy. We use the ProVerif tool to prove that the first two properties are satisfied. In the case of the third property, ProVerif is unable to prove it directly, because its ability to prove observational equivalence between processes is not complete. We provide a manual proof of the required equivalence.

Download to read the full chapter text

Chapter PDF

Similar content being viewed by others

One Vote Is Enough for Analysing Privacy

Chapter © 2022

DABSTERS: A Privacy Preserving e-Voting Protocol for Permissioned Blockchain

Chapter © 2019

How to Challenge and Cast Your e-Vote

Chapter © 2017

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles, books and news in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.
  • e-Governance
  • Formal Languages and Automata Theory
  • Formal Logic
  • Formal Reasoning
  • Theory of Computation
  • Voting
  • Formal Verification Techniques for Software Systems

References

  1. Abadi, M., Blanchet, B., Fournet, C.: Just fast keying in the pi calculus. In: Schmidt, D. (ed.) ESOP 2004. LNCS, vol. 2986, pp. 340–354. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Abadi, M., Cortier, V.: Deciding knowledge in security protocols under equational theories. In: Díaz, J., Karhumäki, J., Lepistö, A., Sannella, D. (eds.) ICALP 2004. LNCS, vol. 3142, pp. 46–58. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Abadi, M., Fournet, C.: Mobile values, new names, and secure communication. In: Nielson, H.R. (ed.) Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, London, UK, January 2001, pp. 104–115. ACM Press, New York (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Blanchet, B.: An efficient cryptographic protocol verifier based on prolog rules. In: Schneider, S. (ed.) 14th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 2001, pp. 82–96. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Blanchet, B.: Automatic Proof of Strong Secrecy for Security Protocols. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, California, May 2004, pp. 86–100 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chadha, R., Kremer, S., Scedrov, A.: Formal analysis of multi-party contract signing. In: Focardi, R. (ed.) 17th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, Asilomar, CA, USA, June 2004, pp. 266–279. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Chaum, D.: Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In: Advances in Cryptology, Proceedings of CRYPTO 1982, pp. 199–203. Plenum Press, New York (1983)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Corin, R., Doumen, J., Etalle, S.: Analysing password protocol security against off-line dictionary attacks. In: 2nd International Workshop on Security Issues with Petri Nets and other Computational Models (WISP 2004). Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2004) (to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Véronique Cortier. Personal communication (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Delaune, S., Jacquemard, F.: A theory of dictionary attacks and its complexity. In: Focardi, R. (ed.) 17th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, June 2004, pp. 2–15. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Fournet, C., Abadi, M.: Hiding names: Private authentication in the applied pi calculus. In: Okada, M., Pierce, B.C., Scedrov, A., Tokuda, H., Yonezawa, A. (eds.) ISSS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2609, pp. 317–338. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Fujioka, A., Okamoto, T., Ohta, K.: A practical secret voting scheme for large scale elections. In: Zheng, Y., Seberry, J. (eds.) AUSCRYPT 1992. LNCS, vol. 718, pp. 244–251. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Kohno, T., Stubblefield, A., Rubin, A.D., Wallach, D.S.: Analysis of an electronic voting system. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lowe, G.: An attack on the Needham-Schroeder public-key authentication protocol. Information Processing Letters 56, 131–133 (1995)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Lowe, G.: Analysing protocols subject to guessing attacks. In: Guttman, J. (ed.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Security (WITS 2002), Portland, Oregon, USA (January 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Zuzana Rjaskova. Electronic voting schemes. Master’s thesis, Comenius University (2002), http://www.tcs.hut.fi/~helger/crypto/link/protocols/voting.html

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification, CNRS UMR 8643 & INRIA Futurs projet SECSI & ENS Cachan, France

    Steve Kremer

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

    Mark Ryan

Authors
  1. Steve Kremer
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mark Ryan
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tel Aviv University,  

    Mooly Sagiv

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Kremer, S., Ryan, M. (2005). Analysis of an Electronic Voting Protocol in the Applied Pi Calculus. In: Sagiv, M. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. ESOP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3444. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31987-0_14

Download citation

  • .RIS
  • .ENW
  • .BIB
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31987-0_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25435-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31987-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)Springer Nature Proceedings Computer Science

Share this paper

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Keywords

  • Blind Signature
  • Electronic Vote
  • Privacy Property
  • Vote Protocol
  • Strong Secrecy

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation

  • Find a journal
  • Publish with us
  • Track your research

Footer Navigation

Discover content

  • Journals A-Z
  • Books A-Z
  • Subjects A-Z

Publish with us

  • Journal finder
  • Publish your research
  • Language editing
  • Open access publishing

Products and services

  • Our products
  • Librarians
  • Societies
  • Partners and advertisers

Our brands

  • Springer
  • Nature Portfolio
  • BMC
  • Palgrave Macmillan
  • Apress
  • Discover

Corporate Navigation

  • Your US state privacy rights
  • Accessibility statement
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Help and support
  • Legal notice
  • Cancel contracts here

129.158.246.160

Not affiliated

Springer Nature

© 2026 Springer Nature