Abstract
Digitization of elections demands end-to-end security of the overall process and hence, cyber security for elections is an important issue. Distributed blockchain technology in e-voting can only provide verification advantages. However, voters’ authenticity, data confidentiality, and intermediaries represent other major concerns in this regard. Existing secure voting frameworks either provide final voting results with the help of trusted intermediaries or provide vote verifiability in an unencrypted domain. At present, there is no such realistic mechanism to assure full security of vote casting and result declaration from cyber threats. Even Microsoft’s ElectionGuard is not free from post-quantum attacks due to additive ElGamal cryptosystem. To achieve effective guards against cyberattacks, we propose a voting framework, which reduces vote transmission overhead on a per-voter basis and supports post-quantum secure automated vote counting and winner selection without any manual intervention with the aid of multi-key homomorphic encryption. Along with suitable preventive measures against double voting, vote rigging, and coercion effects, we include a secure result deciphering process evading the possibility of result alteration using multi-key approach. Though our scheme is scalable for smaller as well as large organizations/communities, encrypted processing is inherently performance-costly. Hence, to reduce the overall timing overhead, encrypted hierarchical processing with zonal segregation and parallel computation have been incorporated. Our proposed scheme demonstrates party-specific vote counting without rank generation within 4 days and 22 h and vote counting with winner rank calculation within 5 days (for four candidates and one hundred thousand voters) without any manual intervention with the support of suitable distributed computing.
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Parbat, T., Banerjee, A., Chatterjee, A. (2023). Democracy in Your Hands!: Practical Multi-key Homomorphic E-Voting. In: Muthukkumarasamy, V., Sudarsan, S.D., Shyamasundar, R.K. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14424. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49099-6_16
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