Design and Implementation of an e-Voting System Based on Paillier Encryption

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud computing technology, cloud services are gaining wider application space. It gives users the advantage of computing power and storage space that were beyond the reach of the past. However, user privacy and data security are the main problems in the application and promotion of cloud system. How to ensure the privacy of data and ensure its availability in the process of calculating data is a major problem. Ensuring both the privacy and the usability of the data in the process of calculation remains a major challenge. As a promising tool for solving such problem, homomorphic encrytion is a hot topic in both academia and industry in recent years. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Paillier encryption and its homomorphic properties implemented in an electronic voting system. We describe an e-voting system based on Paillier homomorphic encryption along with other cryptographic tools such as blind signatures and zero-knowledge proof. The proposed scheme guarantees the general voting system requirements such as eligibility, accuracy, simplicity, privacy, robustness and verifiability. The scheme is implemented in C++ using GMP, an arithmetic multiprecision library, and the “Paillier” library. This implementation uses the CPU to make the calculations necessary during encryption, decryption, vote validation, and tallying. Some portions of the proposed e-voting scheme such as signing the blinded ballots, checking for valid votes and counting up the votes could be made to run in parallel in order to improve the e-voting system performance. We also implement a “small” version of the voting system using CUDA and demonstrate that it is possible to use the GPU’s processing power to accelerate the speed of this e-voting system.