A Peered Bulletin Board for Robust Use in Verifiable Voting Systems

Abstract

The Secure Web Bulletin Board (WBB) is a key component of verifiable election systems. However, there is very little in the literature on their specification, design and implementation, and there are no formally analysed designs. The WBB is used in the context of election verification to publish evidence of voting and tallying that voters and officials can check, and where challenges can be launched in the event of malfeasance. In practice, the election authority has responsibility for implementing the web bulletin board correctly and reliably, and will wish to ensure that it behaves correctly even in the presence of failures and attacks. To ensure robustness, an implementation will typicall..