Paper 2021/304

Epoque: Practical End-to-End Verifiable Post-Quantum-Secure E-Voting

Xavier Boyen and Thomas Haines and Johannes Mueller

Abstract

The ultimate goal in modern secure e-voting is to enable everyone to verify whether the final election result correctly reflects the votes chosen by the (human) voters, without exposing how each individual voted. These fundamental security properties are called end-to-end verifiability and voter privacy. Unfortunately, it turns out to be very challenging to pursue these properties simultaneously, especially when the latter must be future-proofed against the rise of quantum computers. In this work, we show, for the first time, a practical approach to do this. We present Epoque, the first end-to-end verifiable, voter-private, post-quantum-secure homomorphic e-voting protocol. It achieves its properties through the combination of practical lattice-based cryptographic primitives only, in a novel way. We formally prove all our security claims under common trust and hardness assumptions. At the core of Epoque lies an efficient identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme with blazingly fast master-key decryption. It is the component that makes the efficient tallying of thousands or millions of ballots a practical possibility. In order to demonstrate its practicality, we fully implemented it and provide detailed benchmarks; we believe this latter contribution is of independent interest beyond the specific e-voting application.