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Quantum-based anonymity and secure veto

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Abstract

Remarkable theoretical and experimental achievements of quantum technology have convincingly shown that a flourishing quantum age is coming. The threat of quantum attacks posed to the classical cryptographic protocols, whose security lies on the computational complexity of difficult problems, is ever more severe. As a particular voting and typical daily activity, the anonymous veto has already been further studied in classical cryptography. In this paper, a novel quantum anonymous veto protocol with information-theoretic security is proposed. Benefited from the entanglement of GHZ states and quantum nonlocality, our protocol satisfies some desirable properties of reliability, privacy, verifiability, tracelessness, and fairness. Compared to the properties of classical protocols, tracelessness is a unique property in quantum anonymous veto protocol. Using the online analog quantum computer of IBM Corporation placed on the cloud, we make an experimental test of anonymous veto for four voters. Any harmful attempt of cheating from the semi-honest certificate authority center, malicious voters, and external eavesdroppers will be detected by honest participants based on the fantastic quantum world. This work to voting theory helps elucidate how quantum mechanics can be harnessed for secure strategic advantage.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSFC (Grant No. 61801126), Open project of Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. KQI201902), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2020MS014), Beijing Excellent Talents Training Funding Project (Grant No. 201800002685XG356), Research and Application of Key Technologies for Open Source Software Security Monitoring (Grant No. SGFJXT00YJJS1800074), NSFC (Grant No. 61772001, 61901030), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 4194088), the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talent (Grant No. BX20180042), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M640070).

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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, Yuancheng Li, Chaohang Yu & Runhua Shi

  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. School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing city, 100083, China

    Zhichao Zhang

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  1. Qingle Wang
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Correspondence to Yuancheng Li.

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Wang, Q., Li, Y., Yu, C. et al. Quantum-based anonymity and secure veto. Quantum Inf Process 20, 85 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-021-03022-2

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