Electronic voting protocol from bilinear pairings

Abstract

Electronic voting has been an active research area since two decades, which involves using information systems and cryptographic schemes in order to reduce costs and human mistakes as well as increase process speed, without discard its security. In the literature there exist some proposals, which are based on the difficult to resolve mathematical problems such as: prime factorization or discrete logarithm, both of them from Public Key Cryptography. In this paper we describe an electronic voting protocol that meets privacy, transparency and robustness by using a scheme from Identity Based Cryptography. The proposed protocol is divided in four main phases: set-up, authentication, voting and counting and involves a distributed responsibility model, with t out of n entities that are required during the counting phase to decrypt the votes. The paper includes a correctness test to show how the protocol works.

Keywords

• threshold schemes
• blind signature schemes
• electronic votin
• bilinear pairings