Post-Quantum Crystography System for Secure Electronic Voting

Abstract

Security (privacy, confidentiality and integrity) of pre-electoral, electoral and post electoral phases of the electioneering process is fundamental to the success of Electronic Voting (E-Voting) Systems. Crystography, which is the combination of cryptography and steganography could be a fitting ‘tool kit’ for enhancing the security of sensitive election-related information transmitted over public networks, thereby also ensuring free, fair and credible election/voting. Most of the existing secure e-voting systems are based on public key cryptographic schemes like RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), whose security depends on the difficulty of solving Integer Factorization Problem (IFP) and Discrete Logarithm problem (DLP) respectively. However, techniques for solving IFP and DLP problems, improves continually. One of such is the quantum algorithm discovered by Peter Shor in 1994, which can solve both IFP and DLP problems in polynomial time. Consequently, the existence of quantum computers in the range of 1000 bits would spell doom to systems based on those problems. This paper presents the development of a new crystographic system that combines Post Quantum Cryptography with steganography to ensure that the security of e-voting is maintained both in classical computing era as well as post-quantum computing era. Our experiments’ results shows that our proposed system performed better than existing ones.

Keywords

• post-quantum computing
• cryptography
• electronic-voting
• information security
• steganography