In a previous post we described REVIVUS, a proposal that Free & Fair wrote to Tusk Philanthropies for their Mobile Voting Project in October 2020. While we were not funded to work on that project, we were subsequently funded by Tusk Philanthropies in late 2023 to perform a review and gap analysis of a prototype digital absentee voting system and its cryptographic protocol. We delivered that review in early 2024, and it will be made publicly available soon.
After delivering our review we were asked to submit a proposal to develop an open source, high-assurance cryptographic protocol library for end-to-end verifiable Internet voting (E2E-VIV), fit to serve as the core of a digital absentee voting system for U.S. elections. We were funded for that development work in July 2024.
Since then we’ve been designing the cryptographic protocol using rigorous digital engineering, developing formal and semi-formal models (including a detailed threat model) that will help us demonstrate that the resulting library meets the necessary requirements for use in a deployed E2E-VIV system. Most of these requirements are adapted from The Future of Voting: End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting – Specification and Feasibility Study, a report commissioned by the U.S. Vote Foundation in 2014 and written primarily by Free & Fair principals.
Today we’re making the FreeAndFair/MobileVotingCoreCryptography GitHub repository public, so everyone can see the current state of the project’s development and follow our progress. We welcome comments and suggestions as we continue our modeling, implementation, and assurance work.