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.
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.
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.
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 systems are increasingly exposed to security risks, including cyberattacks and threats. These concerns are expected to grow with the development of quantum computing, which may break many classical encryption methods. This paper proposes a secure voting system that combines Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), Dual-Key Symmetric Encryption, and auditable receipts to improve the privacy, security, and reliability of the voting process. The system allows voters to exchange encryption keys securely, submit encrypted votes, and receive confirmation receipts without revealing their vote content. To test the system, quantum and classical communication were simulated using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messaging. The results show that the system can securely process a large number of votes with low delay and minimal errors. This approach provides a practical and forward-looking solution for building secure and verifiable electronic voting systems in the quantum era.
Voting is one of the most prominent components of democracy. The one-vote veto, which requires the voting result to be only “yes” or “no”, is a particularly noteworthy type of voting with widespread application. When obtaining a “no” result, no useful information about the number of “no” votes and who votes “no” is disclosed. In this paper, we introduce a protocol for anonymous one-vote veto utilizing qubits and local Pauli operations Z and X, building simple processes for easy implementation under the current technology. For better elaboration, we give two examples: all voters cast “yes” votes and only one voter casts a "no." Then, the corresponding experiment tests are conducted on the simulated IBM quantum computer to verify their feasibility.We also show that the proposed protocol has the desirable properties of privacy, fairness, verifiability and robustness. Furthermore, we analyze the proposed protocol’s security against cheating from eavesdroppers, a semi-honest server and malicious voters. This work is the first attempt to illustrate how qubits can be useful for building a secure anonymous one-vote veto strategy.
Anonymous voting is a voting method of hiding the link between a vote and a voter, the context of which ranges from governmental elections to decision making in small groups like councils and companies. In this paper, we propose a quantum anonymous voting protocol assisted by two kinds of entangled quantum states. Particularly, we provide a mechanism of opening and permuting the ordered votes of all the voters in an anonymous manner; any party who is interested in the voting results can acquire a permutation copy and then obtains the voting result through a simple calculation. Unlike all previous quantum works on anonymous voting, our quantum anonymous protocol possesses the properties of privacy, self-tallying, nonreusability, verifiability, and fairness at the same time. In addition, we demonstrate that the entanglement of the quantum states used in our protocol makes an attack from an outside eavesdropper and inside dishonest voters impossible. We also generalize our protocol to execute the task of anonymous multiparty computation, such as anonymous broadcast and anonymous ranking.
Quantum cryptography and quantum search algorithm are considered as two important research topics in quantum information science. An asymmetrical quantum encryption protocol based on the properties of quantum one-way function and quantum search algorithm is proposed. Depending on the no-cloning theorem and trapdoor one-way functions of the public-key, the eavesdropper cannot extract any private-information from the public-keys and the ciphertext. Introducing key-generation randomized logarithm to improve security of our proposed protocol, i.e., one private-key corresponds to an exponential number of public-keys. Using unitary operations and the single photon measurement, secret messages can be directly sent from the sender to the receiver. The security of the proposed protocol is proved that it is information-theoretically secure. Furthermore, compared the symmetrical Quantum key distribution, the proposed protocol is not only efficient to reduce additional communication, but also easier to carry out in practice, because no entangled photons and complex operations are required.