Secure electronic voting scheme by the new quantum signature-masked authentication

Abstract

The most successful subject of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution (QKD), which was firstly constructed by Bennett et al.1 in 1984. It is believed that QKD is the first applied quantum information processing and its unconditional security has been proven.2,3 Most recently, in addition to QKD, quantum cryptography protocols have been widely studied in many fields such as quantum digital signature, quantum message authentication, quantum image encryption and quantum steganography. Quantum digital signature is an important topic and a primitive component of modern cryptography. The digital signature is a mathematical scheme that maintains the authenticity of the data and digital document in channel.4 A secure quantum signature scheme requires that each user is able to generate his (her) own signature effectively and verifies the validity of another user’s signature on a specific document. Also, no one is able to efficiently generate the signatures of other users on documents that those users didn’t sign. Therefore, it can be used to guarantee the authenticity, integrity and non-disavowal of transmitted messages or the signer of a document.