In a traditional voting system, voters have to reach the voting system to cast their votes. It is difficult for the elderly and for those living in remote localities to cast a vote. In the era of digital advancements, remote electronic voting has emerged as an efficient means of engaging citizens in decision-making processes. However, ensuring fairness and mitigating fraud in elections remain significant challenges. This research paper proposes a novel approach called Quantum Secret Sharing (QSS) combined with the quantum binary voting protocol, leveraging the capabilities of the IBM Quantum Experience platform. By incorporating established security features and introducing new criteria, this protocol aims to surpass the limitations of classical voting systems. The research involves the creation of communication circuits using IBM Quantum Experience and subsequent analysis through quantum state tomography. By integrating the principles of QSS and the quantum binary voting protocol, the proposed approach addresses the limitations of classical voting systems. The protocol satisfies the standards of traditional voting systems while introducing new criteria to overcome their shortcomings. Through the utilization of IBM Quantum Experience, secure communication circuits are established, and the outcomes are analyzed using quantum state tomography, ensuring the fairness and accuracy of the voting process. It integrates quantum cryptography, quantum communication, and classical cryptography techniques to create a robust and tamper-resistant voting protocol. By employing quantum superposition, the protocol enables voters to cast their votes in multiple states simultaneously, making it extremely difficult for a malicious person to intercept or alter individual votes. Furthermore, quantum entanglement ensures that any unauthorized attempt to measure or manipulate the quantum states would result in detectable changes, enhancing the overall security of the voting process.
In a traditional voting system, voters have to reach the voting system to cast their votes. It is difficult for the elderly and for those living in remote localities to cast a vote. In the era of digital advancements, remote electronic voting has emerged as an efficient means of engaging citizens in decision-making processes. However, ensuring fairness and mitigating fraud in elections remain significant challenges. This research paper proposes a novel approach called Quantum Secret Sharing (QSS) combined with the quantum binary voting protocol, leveraging the capabilities of the IBM Quantum Experience platform. By incorporating established security features and introducing new criteria, this protocol aims to surpass the limitations of classical voting systems. The research involves the creation of communication circuits using IBM Quantum Experience and subsequent analysis through quantum state tomography. By integrating the principles of QSS and the quantum binary voting protocol, the proposed approach addresses the limitations of classical voting systems. The protocol satisfies the standards of traditional voting systems while introducing new criteria to overcome their shortcomings. Through the utilization of IBM Quantum Experience, secure communication circuits are established, and the outcomes are analyzed using quantum state tomography, ensuring the fairness and accuracy of the voting process. It integrates quantum cryptography, quantum communication, and classical cryptography techniques to create a robust and tamper-resistant voting protocol. By employing quantum superposition, the protocol enables voters to cast their votes in multiple states simultaneously, making it extremely difficult for a malicious person to intercept or alter individual votes. Furthermore, quantum entanglement ensures that any unauthorized attempt to measure or manipulate the quantum states would result in detectable changes, enhancing the overall security of the voting process.
In the age of digital transformation, the integrity and security of online voting systems have become a growing concern. Traditional cryptography methods are vulnerable to advances in quantum computing, demanding the need for more secure alternatives. This paper explores the application of quantum cryptography in enhancing the security of blockchain-based voting systems, a decentralized and transparent approach to conduct elections. We introduce a novel quantum-resistant voting protocol that integrates Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, ensuring secure voter authentication, vote casting, and tallying. The methodology combines quantum encryption with blockchain's immutability to create a tamper-proof voting ledger, preventing unauthorized access and vote manipulation. It gives an analysis of potential real-world implementations, positioning a hybrid quantum-blockchain framework as a promising solution for future secure electronic voting systems.
Ensuring the security and integrity of voting systems is crucial for maintaining democratic processes. With the rise of cyber threats targeting electronic voting, traditional cryptographic methods are proving inadequate in safeguarding against sophisticated attacks. Quantum cryptography, particularly Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), offers a promising solution to enhance the security of voting systems by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics. This research explores the application of quantum cryptography in secure voting, highlighting its potential to address vulnerabilities in current systems. The study examines the technological, practical, and legal challenges of implementing quantum-based voting systems, including infrastructure requirements and public acceptance. Furthermore, it assesses how quantum cryptography ensures voter privacy, prevents tampering, and provides robust protection against future quantum computing threats. While significant hurdles remain, the integration of quantum cryptographic techniques presents a transformative opportunity to create more secure and transparent voting processes. This paper outlines the roadmap for adopting quantum cryptography in voting systems and its potential impact on electoral integrity.
In a world where elections touch every aspect of society, the need for secure voting is paramount. Traditional safeguards, based on classical cryptography, rely on complex math problems like factoring large numbers. However, quantum computing is changing the game. Recent advances in quantum technology suggest that classical cryptographic methods may not be as secure as we thought. This paper introduces a quantum voting protocol, a blend of quantum principles (entanglement and superposition), blockchain technology, and digital signatures, all powered by log2n qubits, and designed for approval voting with n candidates. The result is a symphony of security features - binding, anonymity, non-reusability, verifiability, eligibility, and fairness - that chart a new course for voting security. The real world beckons, as we tested this protocol on IBM quantum hardware, achieving impressively low error rates of just 1.17% in a four-candidate election.
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.
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.