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Quantum Bell states-based anonymous voting with anonymity trace

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Abstract

Anonymous voting is widely used in economic and social activities, whenever it requires to express opinions privately and fairly. In this paper, we consider the task of anonymous voting using quantum mechanics. Based on quantum Bell states, anonymous entanglement is established between each voter and a tallier; thus, employing the one-time pad technique, each voter can privately cast his/her vote to the tallier. The tallier provides a mechanism of opening and permuting the ordered votes of all voters in an anonymous manner. With the distribution of all counted votes, the voting results can be obtained through a simple calculation. By a private address index, each voter can anonymously trace his/her counted vote, leading to verifiability. Following the practical requirements, the quantum anonymous voting protocol satisfies privacy, non-reusability and verifiability at the same time. Under the ideal conditions, the security concerning some common attacks is given in detail, and the theoretical analysis states that this protocol is secure.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSFC (Grant No. 61801126), Open project of CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. KQI201902), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2020MS014) Research and Application of Key Technologies for Open Source Software Security Monitoring (Grant No. SGFJXT00YJJS1800074).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Control and Computer Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing City, 102206, China

    Qingle Wang, Jiangshan Liu, Yuancheng Li & Chaohang Yu

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei City, 230026, China

    Qingle Wang

  3. Run Technologies Co., Ltd Beijing, Beijing City, 100192, China

    Qingle Wang

  4. State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China

    Shijie Pan

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  1. Qingle Wang
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Correspondence to Yuancheng Li.

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Wang, Q., Liu, J., Li, Y. et al. Quantum Bell states-based anonymous voting with anonymity trace. Quantum Inf Process 20, 142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-021-03081-5

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