A hybrid approach to vector-based homomorphic tallying remote voting

Vector-based homomorphic tallying remote voting schemes provide an efficient protocol for vote tallying, but they require voters to prove in zero-knowledge that the ballots they cast have been properly generated. This is usually achieved by means of the so-called zero-knowledge range proofs, which should be verified by the polling station before tallying. In this paper, we present an end-to-end verifiable hybrid proposal in which ballots are proven to be correct by making use of a zero-knowledge proof of mixing but still using a homomorphic tallying for gathering the election results. Our proposal offers all the advantages of the homomorphic tallying paradigm, while it avoids the elevated computational cost of range proofs. As a result, ballot verification performance is improved in comparison with the equivalent homomorphic systems. The proposed voting scheme is suitable for multi-candidate elections as well as for elections in which the votes have different weights.

[1]  Subariah Ibrahim,et al.  Secure E-voting with blind signature , 2003, 4th National Conference of Telecommunication Technology, 2003. NCTT 2003 Proceedings..

[2]  Chin-Laung Lei,et al.  A Secure and Practical Electronic Voting Scheme for Real World Environments , 1997 .

[3]  Jens Groth,et al.  Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Voting , 2005, ACNS.

[4]  Kazue Sako,et al.  An Implementation of a Mix-Net Based Network Voting Scheme and Its Use in a Private Organization , 2010, Towards Trustworthy Elections.

[5]  Jonathan Katz,et al.  Cryptographic Counters and Applications to Electronic Voting , 2001, EUROCRYPT.

[6]  Byoungcheon Lee,et al.  Receipt-Free Electronic Voting Scheme with a Tamper-Resistant Randomizer , 2002, ICISC.

[7]  Ivan Damgård,et al.  Proofs of Partial Knowledge and Simplified Design of Witness Hiding Protocols , 1994, CRYPTO.

[8]  Jean-Jacques Quisquater,et al.  Electing a University President Using Open-Audit Voting: Analysis of Real-World Use of Helios , 2009, EVT/WOTE.

[9]  Manos Dramitinos,et al.  The VoteSecureTM Secure Internet Voting System , 2005, iTrust.

[10]  Atsushi Fujioka,et al.  A Practical Secret Voting Scheme for Large Scale Elections , 1992, AUSCRYPT.

[11]  Taher ElGamal,et al.  A public key cyryptosystem and signature scheme based on discrete logarithms , 1985 .

[12]  Alfred Menezes,et al.  Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography , 2004, Springer Professional Computing.

[13]  David Chaum,et al.  Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete , 1985, CACM.

[14]  Kun Peng,et al.  Efficient Multiplicative Homomorphic E-Voting , 2010, ISC.

[15]  Ed Dawson,et al.  Modification and optimisation of a shuffling scheme: stronger security, formal analysis and higher efficiency , 2011, International Journal of Information Security.

[16]  Xun Yi,et al.  Practical Remote End-to-End Voting Scheme , 2011, EGOVIS.

[17]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  Self-tallying Elections and Perfect Ballot Secrecy , 2002, Public Key Cryptography.

[18]  Jens Groth,et al.  Verifiable Shuffle of Large Size Ciphertexts , 2007, Public Key Cryptography.

[19]  Michael J. Fischer,et al.  A robust and verifiable cryptographically secure election scheme , 1985, 26th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1985).

[20]  Kazue Sako,et al.  Efficient Receipt-Free Voting Based on Homomorphic Encryption , 2000, EUROCRYPT.

[21]  Kun Peng,et al.  A general and efficient countermeasure to relation attacks in mix-based e-voting , 2011, International Journal of Information Security.

[22]  David Chaum,et al.  Wallet Databases with Observers , 1992, CRYPTO.

[23]  Kun Peng,et al.  An efficient shuffling based eVoting scheme , 2011, J. Syst. Softw..

[24]  Francesc Sebé,et al.  Constructing credential-based E-voting systems from offline E-coin protocols , 2014, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[25]  Byoungcheon Lee,et al.  Multiplicative Homomorphic E-Voting , 2004, INDOCRYPT.

[26]  Josep M. Miret,et al.  Simple and efficient hash-based verifiable mixing for remote electronic voting , 2010, Comput. Commun..

[27]  Joseph K. Liu,et al.  Robust Receipt-Free Election System with Ballot Secrecy and Verifiability , 2008, NDSS.