Pyrios

Pyrios is a Go library that implements verification of Helios elections, following the Helios v3 verification spec

Helios is a cryptographic election system used by the International Association of Cryptologic Research and the ACM for elections. See the IACR elections page and the ACM elections page for details. Elections in Helios use cryptography to protect ballots and enable public verifiability: anyone can check that the results of an election were computed correctly.

Please note that this is not an official Google product.

Election Verification

Helios elections are identified by a UUID, like 43a30b30-04d8-11e1-8fc9-12313f028a58; the URL for this election is then https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/43a30b30-04d8-11e1-8fc9-12313f028a58. The program helios_verify can be used to verify elections; for this election, you can run the command.

helios_verify -verify -uuid=43a30b30-04d8-11e1-8fc9-12313f028a58 -write=false -logtostderr

The helios_verify program can also download an entire election and all its associated verification information as a single JSON bundle to be verified later. This is the default behavior if the -write=false argument is not provided.

Note that pyrios exploits Go concurrency for ballot verification, so the verification of large elections can be sped up significantly by setting GOMAXPROCS to the number of available CPUs on the machine, e.g.,

export GOMAXPROCS=32

Ballot Audit

Helios ballots can be spoiled at voting time; these ballots are not cast and are only used to make sure the Helios voting booth is encrypting ballots correctly. A spoiled ballot is provided to the user as a JSON file. Given such a JSON file, called test_audit.json, you need the fingerprint of the ballot (provided by the voting booth) and the UUID of the election. Then you can verify this ballot as follows.

helios_audit -ballot=test_audit.json -uuid=b36cbf0c-250a-11e3-89f4-46d2afa631be -download=true -fingerprint=3HknRw5qRLzxs6UQ1XpE8TQznEbN0t8LtISLSPArCj0 -write=false -logtostderr