Study On Electronic Voting Protocols

As the development of the computer and communication technology, the computer has already been widely available for lots of people, its powerful information processing ability strengthens the people's practice ability, lightens the people's heavy work. Election is an important symbol of the modern life. The way of manual processing on the election-related information has not already kept up with the development and the demand of the information ages. Traditional method of election not only consume a great deal of manpower and material resources, and from sending out ballots to tallying and publicizing the result is carried out directly by people at the election process . If any steps are not carried out correctly, the election result will be inequitable. The electronic voting emerges as the times require in the case.The electronic voting implement voting by using computers and Internet technology based on the cryptography. The electronic voting is more efficient and more convenient than the traditional voting, and better than traditional election in security because of using the cryptographic technology. So, many scholars study on the electronic voting in order to enhancing security and providing a convenient tool for legal election.Firstly , the thesis introduces the background and the state-in-art of research on the electronic voting protocols;Secondly, the cryptographic related theory is prepared, which will be used in the thesis. Thirdly, based on discussing and analying the previous electronic voting schemes, a new scheme of election voting is produced. Thenew scheme is based on group signature , ring signature and timed commitment etc. The proposed scheme can restrict the right of registered organizations and prevented them from misusing of power, such that the registered organization trace the voter only by cooperation with the administrated agent. The signature structure is designed in a ring to realize the anonymous property, while anyone's public key could be used by the signer to from this ring. It is easy for a voter to join and leave , just needing the registered organization to add/delete the data of the corresponding voter without adjusting any other parameters. The new scheme also solve the problem of ballots collision by using timed commitment protocol. And the scheme granted the voting rights of the voters by themselves , which make the honest voter get certification without revealing his/her identification. Meanwhile, the system can prevent illegal voters from counterfeiting ballots, and, the unconditional anonymity of legal ballots is assured. Finally, the seven properties that an electronic voting scheme should be with are analyzed and verified in the proposed scheme.Finally another electronic voting protocol based on the sign-cryption algorithm. Flow of the system and analysis of security were given in the thesis. The new scheme not only ensure safety communications but also decrease consumedly the amount of computation and traffic. And the voter vote more than once can be tracked. The new system has some value in theoretical research.