In an electronic voting protocol, a distributed scheme can be used for forbidding the malicious acts of the voting administrator and the counter during the election, but it cannot prevent them from collaborating to trace the ballots and destroy their privacy after the election. We present a distributed anonymous quantum key distribution scheme and further construct a distributed quantum election scheme with a voting administrator made up of more than one part. This quantum election scheme can resist the malicious acts of the voting administrator and the counter after the election and can work in a system with lossy and noisy quantum channels.
In an electronic voting protocol, a distributed scheme can be used for forbidding the malicious acts of the voting administrator and the counter during the election, but it cannot prevent them from collaborating to trace the ballots and destroy their privacy after the election. We present a distributed anonymous quantum key distribution scheme and further construct a distributed quantum election scheme with a voting administrator made up of more than one part. This quantum election scheme can resist the malicious acts of the voting administrator and the counter after the election and can work in a system with lossy and noisy quantum channels.
We present an unconditionally secure quantum election scheme, which based on a distributed scheme to ensure the privacy of the voters. The voting administrator is made up by two parties who cannot cooperate within a certain period of time, and we use an”identity exchange”scheme to conceal the identity of voters. While the election is completed, nobody except the voter himself can match him with his ballot even if the administrator and the counter collaborate up to do so. The scheme can also work well with noisy and lossy quantum channels.
An unconditionally secure authority-certified anonymous quantum key distribution scheme using conjugate coding is presented, based on which we construct a quantum election scheme without the help of an entanglement state. We show that this election scheme ensures the completeness, soundness, privacy, eligibility, unreusability, fairness, and verifiability of a large-scale election in which the administrator and counter are semi-honest. This election scheme can work even if there exist loss and errors in quantum channels. In addition, any irregularity in this scheme is sensible.
An unconditionally secure authority-certified anonymous quantum key distribution scheme using conjugate coding is presented,based on which we construct a quantum election scheme without the help of an entanglement state.We show that this election scheme ensures the completeness,soundness,privacy,eligibility,unreusability,fairness,and verifiability of a large-scale election in which the administrator and counter are semi-honest.This election scheme can work even if there exist loss and errors in quantum channels.In addition,any irregularity in this scheme is sensible.
There is no quantum election protocol that can fulfil the eight requirements of an electronic election protocol, i.e., completeness, robustness, privacy, legality, unreusability, fairness, verifiability, and receipt-freeness. To address this issue, we employ the general construction of quantum digital signature and quantum public key encryption, in conjunction with classic public key encryption, to develop and instantiate a general construction of quantum election protocol. The proposed protocol exhibits the following advantages: (i) no pre-shared key between any two participants is required, and no trusted third party or anonymous channels are required. The protocol is suitable for large-scale elections with numerous candidates and voters and accommodates the situation in which multiple voters vote simultaneously. (ii) It is the first protocol that dismantles the contradiction between verifiability and receipt-freeness in a quantum election protocol. It satisfies all eight requirements stated earlier under the physical assumptions that there exists a one-way untappable channel from the administrator to the voter and that there is no collusion between any of the three parties in the protocol. Compared with current election protocols with verifiability and receipt-freeness, this protocol relies upon fewer physical assumptions. (iii) This construction is flexible and can be instantiated into an election scheme having post-quantum security by applying cryptographic algorithms conveying post-quantum security. Moreover, utilizing quantum digital signature and public key encryption yields a good result: the transmitted ballots are in quantum states, so owing to the no-cloning theorem, ballot privacy is less likely to be compromised, even if private keys of the signature and public key encryption are leaked after the election. However, in existing election protocols employing classic digital signatures and public key encryption, ballot privacy can be easily violated if attackers obtain private keys. Thus, our construction enhances privacy.
Voting forms the most important tool for arriving at a decision in any institution. The changing needs of the civilization currently demands a practical yet secure electronic voting system, but any flaw related to the applied voting technology can lead to tampering of the results with the malicious outcomes. Currently, blockchain technology due to its transparent structure forms an emerging area of investigation for the development of voting systems with a far greater security. However, various apprehensions are yet to be conclusively resolved before using blockchain in high stakes elections. Other than this, the blockchain based voting systems are vulnerable to possible attacks by upcoming noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computer. To circumvent, most of these limitations, in this work, we propose an anonymous voting scheme based on quantum assisted blockchain by enhancing the advantages offered by blockchain with the quantum resources such as quantum random number generators and quantum key distribution. The purposed scheme is shown to satisfy the requirements of a good voting scheme. Further, the voting scheme is auditable and can be implemented using the currently available technology.
Quantum information protocols offer significant advantages in properties such as security, anonymity, and privacy for communication and computing tasks. An application where guaranteeing the highest possible security and privacy is critical for democratic societies is electronic voting. As computational power continues to evolve, classical voting schemes may become increasingly vulnerable to information leakage. In this work, we present the experimental demonstration of an information-theoretically secure and efficient electronic voting protocol that, crucially, does not rely on election authorities, leveraging the unique properties of quantum states. Our experiment is based on a high-performance source of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states and realizes a proof-of-principle implementation of the protocol in two scenarios: a configuration with four voters and two candidates employing privacy enhancement techniques and an election scenario supporting up to eight voters and sixteen candidates. The latter is particularly well-suited for secure board-level elections within organizations or small-scale governmental contexts.