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.
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.
The rapid advancement of internet technology has raised attention to the importance of electronic voting in maintaining democracy and fairness in elections. E-voting refers to the use of electronic technology to facilitate the casting and counting of votes in elections. The need for designated verification arises from concerns about voter privacy, auditability, and the prevention of manipulation. Traditional e-voting systems use cryptographic techniques for security but lack verifiable proof of integrity. Integrating e-voting with a quantum designated verifier could address these challenges by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics to enhance security and trustworthiness. In light of this, we propose a quantum e-voting scheme that uses a designated verifier signature. To ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of the voting process, the scheme uses quantum features like the no-cloning theorem and quantum key distribution. The proposed scheme has security properties like source hiding, non-transferability, and message anonymity. The proposed scheme is resistant to many quantum attacks, such as eavesdropping and impersonation. Due to designated verification, the scheme minimizes the risk of tempering. This paper provides a detailed description of the proposed scheme and analyzes its security properties. Therefore, the proposed scheme is efficient, practical, and secure.
Abstract To better protect the privacy of voters, a receipt-free quantum voting protocol is first proposed, which adopts quantum key agreement and quantum public key encryption with single photons. We employ Lagrange interpolation polynomials and random numbers to blind the voting information on the bulletin board, so that it can minimize the public information. Furthermore, our receipt-free quantum voting protocol is information-theoretically secure, i.e., the eavesdropper cannot get any voting information by collecting both the quantum ciphertext and the public information. In addition, compared with the existing quantum voting protocols, our protocol can meet more security attributes, such as anonymity, unrepeatability, verifiability legitimacy and especially, receipt-freeness.
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.
Electronic voting (e-voting) has emerged as a transformative technology in the modern digital era. Many countries across the world are using e-voting systems in different types of elections, from political to non-political. One of the primary goals of e-voting is ensuring both verifiability and privacy simultaneously, which we refer to as security. Verifiability is a security feature that guarantees voters can confirm their vote is reflected in the final election result, while privacy guarantees that no one is able to link a vote to the voter who cast it. Verifiability needs to hold only for the duration of the election, whereas privacy needs to extend beyond the election period, even decades after the election. This property, known as everlasting privacy in the literature, ensures that even computationally unbounded adversaries cannot compromise voter privacy, securing elections against future advances in computing, including quantum computing. Researchers have proposed a wide variety of protocols to achieve this ambitious goal in secure e-voting, however, these protocols differ significantly, making the analysis and state-of-the-art complicated. In this thesis, we first address this fragmentation by systematically analyzing all existing e-voting protocols designed to ensure everlasting privacy. We map out the relationships and dependencies among these protocols, evaluate their security and efficiency under realistic assumptions, and identify unresolved challenges in the field. Our work provides a foundational reference for researchers aiming to design secure e-voting systems with everlasting privacy, paving the way for privacypreserving elections in the post-quantum era. Building on these insights, we propose a novel e-voting system that integrates the best practices from prior research while addressing their limitations. Leveraging the Hyperion scheme as a foundation, we develop an enhanced protocol that not only guarantees everlasting privacy but also introduces everlasting receipt-freeness and coercion mitigation. Unlike existing systems like Selene and Hyperion, which rely on computational assumptions for privacy, our protocol offers privacy even against adversaries with unlimited computational power. In secure electronic voting systems with everlasting privacy, the focus is on futureproofing privacy, while sometimes election verifiability relies on the computational soundness of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), which are vulnerable to quantum adversaries. Therefore, a key technical challenge is designing e-voting systems with efficient post-quantum cryptographic primitives to secure both privacy and verifiability against quantum attacks. In this thesis, we advance the state of post-quantum ZKPs by focusing on the ZKPs proposed by Jain et al., which are based on the conservative Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption. We optimize the efficiency of these ZKPs, achieve formal security verification using EasyCrypt, and uncover flaws in existing implementations, demonstrating their vulnerability to malicious provers. Additionally, we construct the first code-based ZKP of shuffle, enabling a verifiable and privacy-preserving e-voting protocol with mixing-based tallying. Our e-voting system ensures both verifiability and vote privacy through the computational difficulty of decoding random linear codes, marking it as the first verifiable code-based e-voting system.
Electronic voting is a very useful but challenging internet-based protocol that despite many theoretical approaches and various implementations with different degrees of success, remains a contentious topic due to issues in reliability and security. Here we present a quantum protocol that exploits an untrusted source of multipartite entanglement to carry out an election without relying on election authorities, simultaneous broadcasting, or computational assumptions, and whose result is publicly verifiable. The level of security depends directly on the fidelity of the shared multipartite entangled quantum state, and the protocol can be readily implemented for a few voters with state-of-the-art photonic technology.
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.