An electronic voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption and decentralization

Ke Yuan; Peng Sang; Suya Zhang; Xi Chen; Wei Yang; Chunfu Jia

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.1649

An electronic voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption and decentralization

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2023 Oct 18:9:e1649. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1649. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Ke Yuan^{1

2}, Peng Sang¹, Suya Zhang¹, Xi Chen³, Wei Yang¹, Chunfu Jia^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Henan University, School of Computer and Information Engineering, Kaifeng, Henan, China.
² Henan University, Henan Province Engineering Research Center of Spatial Information Processing, Kaifeng, Henan, China.
³ Henan University, International Education College, Zhengzhou, Henan, China.
⁴ Nankai University, College of Cybersecurity, Tianjin, China.

Abstract

Compared with paper-based voting, electronic voting not only has advantages in storage and transmission, but also can solve the security problems that exist in traditional voting. However, in practice, most electronic voting faces the risk of voting failure due to malicious voting by voters or ballot tampering by attackers. To solve this problem, this article proposes an electronic voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption and decentralization, which uses the Paillier homomorphic encryption method to ensure that the voting results are not leaked until the election is over. In addition, the scheme applies signatures and two layers of encryption to the ballots. First, the ballot is homomorphically encrypted using the homomorphic public key; then, the voter uses the private key to sign the ballot; and finally, the ballot is encrypted using the public key of the counting center. By signing the ballots and encrypting them in two layers, the security of the ballots in the transmission process and the establishment of the decentralized scheme are guaranteed. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can guarantee the completeness, verifiability, anonymity, and uniqueness of the electronic voting scheme. The performance analysis shows that the computational efficiency of the proposed scheme is improved by about 66.7% compared with the Fan et al. scheme (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.10.016).

Keywords: Decentralization; Electronic voting; Homomorphic encryption.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61972073, 61972215, 62066040), the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin (20JCZDJC00640), the Key Specialized Research and Development Program of Henan Province (222102210062), the Basic Higher Educational Key Scientific Research Program of Henan Province (22A413004), and the National Innovation Training Program of University Student (202110475072). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.