Towards A practical JCJ / civitas implementation

Abstract

Internet voting continues to enjoy wide interest from both research and practice. Among the Internet voting schemes developed over the last decades, JCJ / Civitas stands out from the masses due to its innovative approach to resist voter coercion. To achieve its ambitious goal, the scheme builds upon particularly restrictive assumptions and an abstract credential handling rendering the scheme impractical for real-world use. At ARES 2012, Neumann and Volkamer presented a proposal which implements several of these assumptions (voter-side assumptions) and the credential handling by the use of smart cards. While addressing these practical shortcomings of JCJ / Civitas, their proposal did not take performance into account, and accordingly its performance has not been evaluated. In the present work, we revise the ARES proposal from a performance perspective in a security-invariant manner. Based on the herein proposed revisions, we are able to conclude that the revised ARES proposal is feasible to be used in real-world elections.