Apollo – End-to-end verifiable internet voting with recovery from vote manipulation

Abstract

We present security vulnerabilities in the remote voting system Helios. We propose Apollo, a modified version of Helios, which addresses these vulnerabilities and could improve the feasibility of internet voting. In particular, we note that Apollo does not possess Helios’ major known vulnerability, where a dishonest voting terminal can change the vote after it obtains the voter’s credential. With Apollo-lite, votes not authorized by the voter are detected by the public and prevented from being included in the tally. The full version of Apollo enables a voter to prove that her vote was changed. We also describe a very simple protocol for the voter to interact with any devices she employs to check on the voting system, to enable frequent and easy auditing of encryptions and checking of the bulletin board.