An Elliptic Curve Based Homomorphic Remote Voting System

A remote voting system allows participants to cast their ballots through the Internet. Remote voting systems based on the use of homomorphic public key cryptography have proven to be a good option for carrying out simple elections with a reduced amount of candidates. In this paper, we present a new system that makes use of the additive homomorphic capabilities of the Elliptic Curve ElGamal (EC-ElGamal) cryptosystem. All the stages of the system are described together with an experimental analysis section which provides an assessment on the type of election our system would be suitable for.Research of the authors was supported in part by grants MTM2010-21580-C02-01 (Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), 2014SGR-1666 (Generalitat de Catalunya) and IPT-2012-0603-430000 (Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad)

A tool for implementing privacy in Nano

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We present a work in progress strategy for implementing privacy in Nano at the consensus level, that can be of independent interest. Nano is a cryptocurrency that uses an Open Representative Voting (ORV) as a consensus mechanism, a variant of Delegated Proof of Stake. Each transaction on the network is voted on by representatives, and each vote has a weight equal to the percentage of their total delegated balance. Every account can delegate their stake to any other account (including itself) and change it anytime it wants. The goal of this paper is to achieve a way for the consensus algorithm to function without knowing the individual balances of each account. The tool is composed of three different schemes. The first is a weighted threshold secret sharing scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem for polynomial rings [1] and it's used to generate, in a distributed way, a secret that will be a private key of an additive ElGamal cryptosystem over elliptic curves (EC-EG) [2], which is additive homomorphic. The second scheme is the polynomials commitment scheme presented in [3] and is used to make the previous scheme verifiable, i.e., without the need of a trusted dealer. Finally, the third scheme is used to decrypt a ciphertext of the EC-EG cryptosystem without reconstructing the private key and, because of that, can be used multiple times.IEEEinfo:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Smart registration in Blockchain using zk-SNARKs

Smart registration in blockchain using zk-SNARKsEnsuring privacy in public blockchains is a challenge and a necessity for the success of distributed applications also known as Web3 applications. The cryptographic protocols that allow the implementation of privacy are the Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and this is the scope of this work. In particular, this Thesis analyzes in detail the Pinocchio/- Groth16 protocol, which is a type of zero knowledge Succinct Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK). Then, we use an implementation of this protocol that uses a new programming language called circom which, together with JavaScript libraries, allows the user to validate circuit-based computations while keeping private some of the inputs. Different circuits are described and tested to prove that the privacy requirements of a distributed application can be met using the Pinocchio/Groth16 protocol

Theory and Practice of Cryptography and Network Security Protocols and Technologies

In an age of explosive worldwide growth of electronic data storage and communications, effective protection of information has become a critical requirement. When used in coordination with other tools for ensuring information security, cryptography in all of its applications, including data confidentiality, data integrity, and user authentication, is a most powerful tool for protecting information. This book presents a collection of research work in the field of cryptography. It discusses some of the critical challenges that are being faced by the current computing world and also describes some mechanisms to defend against these challenges. It is a valuable source of knowledge for researchers, engineers, graduate and doctoral students working in the field of cryptography. It will also be useful for faculty members of graduate schools and universities