Combined zero knowledge proof and homomorphic encryption voting

number: 
2782
English
Degree: 
Author: 
Nada Mehdi Kittan
Supervisor: 
Dr. Mahmood Khalil Ibraham
year: 
2012
Abstract:

Electronic voting is a process held over electronic media, i.e. computers and communication technologies. For such a sensitive issue like election, security is one of the main concerns, such as authentication, confidentiality and integrity. Simplicity is also necessary to ensure the participation of common people. Besides security and simplicity, there may be some other issues that need to be considered. In that respect, specify all such issues or properties that the election system must possess, such as reliability, convenience, flexibility, mobility and cost. A well-defined protocol is necessary to take care of all such requirements. Recent improvements in network security have made it possible to design election system with high class security, but it is also important that carefully designed protocols and continuous improvements of the implementations are necessary to keep them immune to network threats. From that point of view, an implementation of secure Internet voting protocol appears to be another application of cryptography and network security. In this project, a model of secure electronic voting system is presented with two new technologies; the first technique is designing new zero knowledge authentication protocol, based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm, to ensure a mutual authentication between the election authority server and the voters. To ensure the security of the votes and maintain the confidentiality, homomorphic encryption scheme is used to encrypt all the votes and perform the calculation of the votes without revealing any information about it. The proposed system provides secure voting over the Internet and maintains all the requirements of the voting process.