A Secure E-Voting System Based on RSA Time-Lock Puzzle Mechanism

The main principle of e-voting is that it must be as similar to regular voting as possible, compliant with election legislation and principles and be at least as secure as regular voting. Therefore, e-voting must be uniform and secret, only eligible persons could be allowed to use the e-voting system. In this paper, we assume that every voter should be able to cast only one vote corresponding to one voting case, a voter will not be able to prove her/his choice. Furthermore, the collecting of votes has to be secure, reliable and accountable. In the term of Timed-Release Cryptography, e-voting is intended to prevent the early opening of electronically-case votes. It also avoids election fraud which means that all parties involved do not have access to the results until a specific, predefined time in the future. In this thesis, we propose an RSA time-lock puzzle authenticated e-voting system. It provides public-key based authenticated encryption algorithm that takes sender´s secret key, receiver´s public key and designated time. Therefore, the resulting cipher text can be decrypted only by receiver and only starting with designated time by using receiver´s secret key and sender´s public key, together with some secret that will be disclosed only on designated time.