Pub. online:7 Dec 2022Type:Research ArticleOpen Access
Journal:Informatica
Volume 33, Issue 4 (2022), pp. 749–769
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a light-weight electronic voting protocol. The approach used by our protocol to conceal the ballots does not imply encryption, and guarantees the privacy of the direction of the vote unless all the contestants (parties) agree to do so. Our method is based on the division of the ballot into different pieces of information, which separately reveal no information at all, and that can be latter aggregated to recover the original vote. We show that, despite its simplicity, this scheme is powerful, it does not sacrifice any of the security properties demanded in a formal electronic voting protocol, and, furthermore, even in post-quantum scenarios, neither the casted votes can be tampered with, nor the identity of any elector can be linked with the direction of her vote.
Journal:Informatica
Volume 31, Issue 4 (2020), pp. 751–768
Abstract
In cryptography, key establishment protocols are often the starting point paving the way towards secure execution of different tasks. Namely, the parties seeking to achieve some cryptographic task, often start by establishing a common high-entropy secret that will eventually be used to secure their communication. In this paper, we put forward a security model for group key establishment ($\mathsf{GAKE}$) with an adversary that may execute efficient quantum algorithms, yet only once the execution of the protocol has concluded. This captures a situation in which keys are to be established in the present, while security guarantees must still be provided in the future when quantum resources may be accessible to a potential adversary.
Further, we propose a protocol design that can be proven secure in this model. Our proposal uses password authentication and builds upon efficient and reasonably well understood primitives: a message authentication code and a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism. The hybrid structure dodges potential efficiency downsides, like large signatures, of some “true” post-quantum authentication techniques, making our protocol a potentially interesting fit for current applications with long-term security needs.
Pub. online:1 Jan 2019Type:Research ArticleOpen Access
Journal:Informatica
Volume 30, Issue 3 (2019), pp. 595–612
Abstract
Certificate-based cryptography (CB-PKC) is an attractive public key setting, which reduces the complexity of public key infrastructure in traditional public key settings and resolves the key escrow problem in ID-based public key settings. In the past, a large number of certificate-based signature and encryption schemes were proposed. Nevertheless, the security assumptions of these schemes are mainly relied on the difficulties of the discrete logarithm and factorization problems. Unfortunately, both problems will be resolved when quantum computers come true in the future. Public key cryptography from lattices is one of the important candidates for post-quantum cryptography. However, there is little work on certificate-based cryptography from lattices. In the paper, we propose a new and efficient certificate-based signature (CBS) scheme from lattices. Under the short integer solution (SIS) assumption from lattices, the proposed CBS scheme is shown to be existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attacks. Performance comparisons are made to demonstrate that the proposed CBS scheme from lattices is better than the previous lattice-based CBS scheme in terms of private key size and signature size.