Verified verifiers for verifying elections

Abstract

The security and trustworthiness of elections is critical to democracy; alas, securing elections is notoriously hard. Powerful cryptographic techniques for verifying the integrity of electronic voting have been developed and are in increasingly common use. The claimed security guarantees of most of these techniques have been formally proved. However, implementing the cryptographic verifiers which utilise these techniques is a technical and error prone process, and often leads to critical errors appearing in the gap between the implementation and the formally verified design. We significantly reduce the gap between theory and practice by using machine checked proofs coupled with code extraction to produce cryptographic verifiers that are themselves formally verified. We demonstrate the feasibility of our technique by producing a formally verified verifier which we use to check the 2018 International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) directors election.