The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Electronic voting systems are essential for holding virtual elections, and the need for such systems increases due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing that it mandates. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots, and that the privacy of the voters is preserved. We propose secure voting protocols for elections that are governed by two central families of voting rules: score-based and order-based rules. Our protocols offer perfect ballot secrecy, in the sense that they issue only the required output, while no other information on the cast ballots is revealed. Such perfect secrecy, which is achieved by employing secure multiparty computation tools, may increase the voters’ confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. The protocols' high level of privacy, and their lightweight nature, make them an adequate and powerful tool for democracies of any size. Joint work with Lihi Dery and Avishay Yanai Short bio: Professor Tamir Tassa is a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Open University of Israel. Previously, he served as a lecturer and researcher in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University, and in the Department of Computer Science at Ben Gurion University. During the years 1993-1996 he served as an assistant professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1993. His recent research interests include secure multiparty computation, privacy-preserving data publishing and data mining, and secret sharing.