Post-quantum lattice-based E-voting for multiple candidates

Guillaume Kaim, Sébastien Canard, Adeline Roux-Langlois +1 more

Zeyu Sun, Wenhua Gao, Hua Dong +2 more

Shun Zhang, Sheng-lan Wang, Qing Wang +1 more

Sourav, Rifaqat Ali

Electronic voting (e-voting) systems have gained prominence as secure, efficient, and scalable alternatives to traditional paper-based voting. However, the advent of quantum computing poses a serious threat to classical cryptographic techniques like Rivest–Shamir–Adleman and elliptic curve cryptography, which are commonly used in securing e-voting platforms. This creates an urgent need for post-quantum cryptographic solutions that can preserve the core security properties of confidentiality, integrity, verifiability, and unforgeability under quantum attacks. This chapter addresses these challenges by introducing post-quantum lattice-based signcryption scheme for electronic voting (PQLS-EVote), a novel signcryption scheme based on lattice-based cryptography. The scheme leverages the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) and short integer solution (SIS) problems to achieve post-quantum security. A major novelty of PQLS-EVote lies in its use of rejection sampling to optimize ring signature generation, minimizing computational overhead. Additionally, a ( https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> t , n ) threshold mechanism is incorporated to ensure decentralized trust and fault tolerance. Security is formally analyzed in the random oracle model. Performance evaluation and comparison with existing schemes confirm that PQLS-EVote achieves strong security guarantees, improved efficiency, and scalability, making it a promising candidate for secure quantum-resistant e-voting systems.

Xu-Feng Niu, Jian-Zhong Zhang, Shu-Cui Xie +1 more

Diego F. Aranha, Carsten Baum, Kristian Gjøsteen +1 more

Cryptographic voting protocols have recently seen much interest from practitioners due to their (planned) use in countries such as Estonia, Switzerland, France, and Australia. Practical protocols usually rely on tested designs such as the mixing-and-decryption paradigm. There, multiple servers verifiably shuffle encrypted ballots, which are then decrypted in a distributed manner. While several efficient protocols implementing this paradigm exist from discrete log-type assumptions, the situation is less clear for post-quantum alternatives such as lattices. This is because the design ideas of the discrete log-based voting protocols do not carry over easily to the lattice setting, due to specific problems such as noise growth and approximate relations.