Privocracy: Online Democracy through Private Voting

Abstract: In traditional access control policies, every access granted and administrative account introduces an additional vulnerability, as a corruption of a high-privilege user can compromise several sensitive files. Privocracy is an access control mechanism that minimizes the need to attribute high privileges by triggering a secure e-voting procedure to run commands that require using sensitive resources. With Privocracy an organization can distribute trust in resource access, minimizing the system vulnerabilities from single points of failure, all while maintaining the high flexibility of discretionary access control policies. The Privocracy voting mechanism achieves everlasting privacy, ensuring votes remain confidential regardless of an adversary's computational power, while addressing the dependability requirements of a practical and secure system. The procedure incorporates useful features such as vote delegation to reduce voter fatigue, rapid voting rounds to enable quick action during emergencies, and selective vote auditing for application-level accountability. Our experimental results demonstrate that Privocracy processes votes efficiently and can be deployed on commodity hardware.