Identity based threshold cryptography and blind signatures for electronic voting

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing interest to improve the efficiency in election processes which has brought as a consequence a wide range of proposals for electronic voting. Electronic voting protocols are a reasonable alternative to conventional elections. Nevertheless, they are facing an evolution due to its requirements, especially the ones needed to provide full security considered to represent a democratic electronic vote. In the literature, different protocols based on public key schemes have been proposed to meet such security requirements. In this paper, we propose the use of bilinear pairings in order to provide the security requirements that an electronic voting protocol must meet, without requiring the entire infrastructure needed in a public key scheme. Proposed protocol considers two cryptographic primitives as main building blocks: threshold and blind signature schemes. It is divided in four main stages: set-up, authentication, voting and counting. Moreover, it meets privacy, accuracy and robustness by using bilinear pairings. We make a comparative analysis, which is based on its performance and the key pairs, Trust and Certification Authorities it requires.