A New Multiple Key Cipher and an Improved Voting Scheme

Abstract

At Eurocrypt 88 we introduced the notion of a multiple key cipher and illustrated it with an example based on RSA which we called "multiple key RSA". In this paper we consider another multiple key cipher also based on a well known cryptographic function, exponentiation in a prime field. The important difference from multiple key RSA is that this function does not possess the trapdoor property, At the end of Cl1 we speculated that such functions may have useful applications and here we give as one illustration a new voting scheme.