Submitted Abstract
Digital information and communication technologies are entrenched in the fabric of modern society and enrich and facilitate our lives. Used carefully, these tools can also serve to enrich and protect core mechanisms, such as elections, that are fundamental to the functioning of democratic societies. Elections form the foundations of democracy and as such, ensuring their security is of the utmost importance. One of the major security challenges that must be addressed is the threat posed by the emergence of scalable quantum computers. Despite a considerable number of well-designed, secure electronic voting protocols proposed over the past few decades, almost all existing schemes largely depend on cryptographic primitives that are known to be vulnerable to quantum algorithms, e.g., constructions relying on the discrete logarithm problem or that of integer factorization. Therefore, a primary goal of this project is to advance the state-of-the-art by developing and prototyping practical e-voting schemes that are secure against efficient adversaries capable of performing arbitrary quantum computations. We aim to achieve this by building on recent developments in quantum-secure cryptographic primitives, such as lattice-based cryptosystems. We will combine or adapt known constructions and develop new ones to support novel quantum-secure e-voting schemes with an emphasis on usability. These schemes will also provide protection against other threats to democracy such as vote buying and voter coercion. Finally, another noteworthy aspect is that not only e-democracy will benefit from this project but many other areas will profit from further development of efficient post-quantum primitives such as digital signatures, authenticated key exchange and distributed ledgers.