The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to the cryptographic foundations of current electronic voting (e-voting) systems, which commonly rely on algorithms such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). These algorithms are believed to be vulnerable to attacks imposed by quantum computers, jeopardizing core e-voting properties, including ballot secrecy, integrity, and auditability. To address these challenges, this work presents a quantum-resistant electronic-voting (e-voting) system, named post-quantum e-voting system (PQEVS) built entirely upon cryptographic primitives standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for post-quantum security. The proposed PQEVS utilizes Dilithium for secure voter authentication, Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV)-based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for privacy-preserving vote tallying, and Picnic-based Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to ensure vote validity without compromising voter anonymity. Designed for modularity and scalability, our PQEVS delivers enhanced security while achieving significant performance gains, reducing vote processing latency by 85% and supporting throughputs of up to 36,000 votes per second. These results highlight the practicality and robustness of post-quantum cryptography in securing large-scale electoral processes, setting a new benchmark for verifiable and future-proof e-voting systems.
The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to the cryptographic foundations of current electronic voting (e-voting) systems, which commonly rely on algorithms such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). These algorithms are believed to be vulnerable to attacks imposed by quantum computers, jeopardizing core e-voting properties, including ballot secrecy, integrity, and auditability. To address these challenges, this work presents a quantum-resistant electronic-voting (e-voting) system, named post-quantum e-voting system (PQEVS) built entirely upon cryptographic primitives standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for post-quantum security. The proposed PQEVS utilizes Dilithium for secure voter authentication, Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV)-based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for privacy-preserving vote tallying, and Picnic-based Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to ensure vote validity without compromising voter anonymity. Designed for modularity and scalability, our PQEVS delivers enhanced security while achieving significant performance gains, reducing vote processing latency by 85% and supporting throughputs of up to 36,000 votes per second. These results highlight the practicality and robustness of post-quantum cryptography in securing large-scale electoral processes, setting a new benchmark for verifiable and future-proof e-voting systems.
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 (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.
The ultimate goal in modern secure e-voting is to enable everyone to verify whether the final election result correctly reflects the votes chosen by the (human) voters, without exposing how each individual voted. These fundamental security properties are called end-to-end verifiability and voter privacy. Unfortunately, it turns out to be very challenging to pursue these properties simultaneously, especially when the latter must be future-proofed against the rise of quantum computers. In this work, we show, for the first time, a practical approach to do this. We present Epoque, the first end-to-end verifiable, voter-private, post-quantum-secure homomorphic e-voting protocol. It achieves its properties through the combination of practical lattice-based cryptographic primitives only, in a novel way. We formally prove all our security claims under common trust and hardness assumptions. At the core of Epoque lies an efficient identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme with blazingly fast master-key decryption. It is the component that makes the efficient tallying of thousands or millions of ballots a practical possibility. In order to demonstrate its practicality, we fully implemented it and provide detailed benchmarks; we believe this latter contribution is of independent interest beyond the specific e-voting application.
The ongoing development of powerful quantum computers poses a significant threat to the security of conventional encryption methods such as Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). With algorithms such as Shor's Algorithm, quantum computers can solve the mathematical problems on which these methods are based and thus break them within a few hours. This work highlights this development's challenges and examines post-quantum cryptography (PQC) as a solution. PQC offers quantum-safe encryption based on mathematical problems that are difficult to solve, even for quantum computers. The text analyzes lattice, hash, and isogeny-based approaches and introduces the new NIST standards, including Kyber, Dilithium, and Sphinx+. It also discusses practical challenges in implementing quantum-safe systems, including performance degradation and cryptographic agility. It concludes with recommendations for migrating to PQC to ensure long-term security in an era increasingly characterized by quantum computing.
The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to current cryptographic systems, particularly public-key algorithms such as RSA and ECC, which are vulnerable to quantum attacks like Shor's algorithm. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) aims to develop and standardize quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms to secure digital communications in the quantum era. This paper examines the current landscape of PQC, focusing on the evaluation and standardization efforts led by organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We analyze the major families of quantum-resistant algorithms, including lattice-based, hash-based, code-based, multivariate, and isogeny-based cryptography, discussing their security guarantees, performance trade-offs, and implementation challenges. Furthermore, we review NIST's PQC standardization process, highlighting selected finalists and alternate candidates, and explore the ongoing transition challenges in adopting these algorithms across industries. Finally, we discuss future directions for PQC research, including hybrid cryptographic systems and the need for continued cryptanalysis to ensure long-term security. This work provides a comprehensive overview of the progress and challenges in deploying quantum-resistant cryptography to safeguard against emerging quantum threats.
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.