A Formal Approach to Coercion Resistance and Its Application to E-Voting

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to electronic voting—this time as a potential option to contain the spread during elections. One of the long unresolved topics with remote voting is the risk of voter’s coercion due to the uncontrolled environment in which it takes place, indicating the importance of the coercion resistance property. In the present article, the authors conduct a database analysis of over 350 articles to present different formal definitions of coercion resistance based on three frameworks (game-based definitions, applied pi-calculus, and logic). Finally, the different security properties of each one are studied and compared in order to facilitate the development of electronic voting schemes.

Keywords

• electronic voting
• coercion resistance
• applied pi-calculus
• temporal logics