Today we are releasing an initial version of VoteSecure, an open source cryptographic voting protocol designed to serve as the secure core of future end‑to‑end verifiable Internet voting (E2E‑VIV) systems. VoteSecure is sponsored by The Mobile Voting Foundation and provides a transparent, evidence‑backed foundation that others can safely build upon.
Free & Fair exists to usher in a new era of provably secure, verifiable elections. We build high‑assurance, open source systems and provide verifiable evidence of their correctness and security. This release reflects that mission: rigorous engineering, open code and models, and a foundation designed for hardware independence and public review. We’re excited to share it with election officials, vendors, researchers, and the broader community.
The release provides:
- Protocol: A cryptographic core that enables cast‑as‑intended, recorded‑as‑cast, and counted‑as‑recorded verification, yielding software independence and public auditability.
- Assurance artifacts: Domain and requirements models, a formal architecture specification, and the most comprehensive threat model for elections ever created.
- Security posture: Open design and code, trust distributed via threshold cryptography, verifiable shuffling and decryption (mixnets and zero‑knowledge proofs), mutually authenticated signed protocol messages, sensitive keys and operations isolated in an air‑gapped environment.
- Built with Rigorous Digital Engineering (RDE): A formal, model-based systems engineering methodology with precise models, analyzable specifications, and formal verification‑centric design.
VoteSecure is a cryptographic protocol and reference cryptographic library, not a complete voting system. Election technology vendors, jurisdictions, and civic organizations can customize user experience and workflow while relying on a uniform, verifiable core.
Team
Over 16 months, Free & Fair led a rigorous digital engineering effort to design, formalize, implement, and assure VoteSecure’s open-source cryptographic core. This work was delivered in close collaboration with Sequent and Verificatum, relying upon their deep cryptographic expertise and hands-on experience in building, deploying, and supporting remote voting systems.
- Sequent, creators of an open-source, end-to-end verifiable Internet voting platform, have contributed core architecture and implementation of the cryptographic subsystem. Their many years experience in implementing and deploying mission-critical, high-performance cryptographic algorithms and protocols for election systems has been invaluable.
- Verificatum, led by Dr. Douglas Wikström, is providing his decades of expertise in open-source verifiable mix-nets and client-side cryptography and advising on protocol design and security proofs—foundational work that safeguards voter privacy and enables end-to-end verifiability.
The VoteSecure protocol is specified as a chapter in Dr. Wikström’s draft “Electronic Voting Systems” book, which is a complete, rigorous, and self-contained treatment of electronic voting systems based on the El Gamal cryptosystem, and additionally gives exact and tight proofs of security that provide meaningful security guarantees in practice. We strongly believe that if electronic voting systems are to be used in demanding real-world elections, such proofs of security are essential.
Get the code and read more
- Repository: https://github.com/FreeAndFair/VoteSecure
- Overview of rigorous digital engineering: https://rde.freeandfair.us
Call for participation
- Vendors and jurisdictions: Build on the protocol to deliver accessible, verifiable systems; use the assurance artifacts to support certification and public review.
- Security researchers and auditors: Examine the models, proofs, and code; file issues; propose improvements; red‑team the design.
- Policymakers and funders: Encourage procurement and certification processes that reward rigorous, evidence‑backed engineering.
We appreciate the support from the Mobile Voting Foundation and the broader community’s ongoing review. As with all critical election technology, transparency and independent verification are essential; please take a look and help make this foundation stronger.