The Communications Infrastructure Essay

Introduction

Two endpoints encompass a communication infrastructure; one is the user's host while the other is the elections server. On the other hand, cryptography is mainly used in protecting the communication between the elections server and the user's browser to guarantee network traffic's integrity and confidentiality. These aspects are of concern primarily because electronic voting can be subjected to electoral fraud due to remote voting. An Internet system used in the voting system is vulnerable to threats of fraud, attackers, and compromised computers that can lead to attacks in the network. This calls for better mechanisms of authentication, integrity, anonymity, secrecy, and confidentiality. The use of cryptographic system allows for the incorporation of these aspects, which justifies the need for cryptography for security purposes to avert threats, as well as for verification purposes. The verification steps are vital for detecting and countering attacks.

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Techniques Used in a Voting system

There are various techniques for realizing the specifications shown in Figure 1 to a certain degree. Some of the techniques have been subjected to academic analysis while others in a real election scenario. In academia, a distinction between the protocols can be seen, which is based on the mix-nets, blind signatures, and homomorphic encryption protocols, but are rarely used in elections. Instead, more practical systems have been based, such as randomized ballots and hashes. If electronic means are not used for securing information, visual cryptography can be handy, which entails voter verifiability of paper audit trails, as well as trusted parties.

The general use of cryptography in voting entails the use of a cryptography key that secures the electronic voting systems. It is often abbreviated to "crypto" and refers to a technology for protecting information via information manipulation. It is mainly used for protecting the confidentiality, the integrity, and authenticity of the voting information. For network application, encryption systems are applied between host to host or link encryption, as well as an end to end application, which is ensured through signing. Encryption refers to data scrambling in accordance to a specified procedure, and the resulting data becomes unrecognizable. Cryptographic keys are used in the information scrambling, for example, DES or AES and are usually huge numbers. In the decryption, a key is also needed for recovering the original data.

Basic Cryptographic Tools

Cryptography is an essential practice in an election system as it helps protect communication of the computer system endpoints; the election servers and the browser of users thereby ensuring the security of the voter information and privacy, which allows for futuristic verification purposes. For this reason, cryptographic technology is heavily relied on in guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of the election system network traffic, thereby allowing for sender verification. This section covers background information about techniques employed in cryptographic practice including encryption, decryption, hashing, as well as protocols employed in electronic voting systems.

Symmetric Encryption

In symmetric key encryption cryptosystem, just as the name implies, the same key that is used for encryption is also used for decryption. As such, in this type of encryption, the encryption algorithm and the secret key interact thereby allowing for the transformation of plaintext into the subsequent ciphertext. Similarly, in the decryption context, same decryption algorithm and the secret key are used in performing the decryption of the ciphertext to the original plaintext. However, the cryptosystem strength and efficiency are directly correlated to the key space that uses reasonable 64,128,256-bit key lengths. Ideally, such a system is useful in not compromising confidentiality, as well as the end-to-end encryption.

In such a scheme for encryption, Alice and Bob share a secret key only known to them for message encryption before sending it, as well as for the decryption. Alice encrypts the confidential message that will be subsequently sent to Bob by first transforming the plaintext to the ciphertext while utilizing a secret key and a symmetric algorithm. Once Bob receives the encrypted message in the form of ciphertext, he uses the same key used for encryption for decrypting it back to the original plaintext. This is shown in Figure 2 below. Essentially, symmetric algorithms (i.e., AES) are of importance in cryptography as they are utilized in maintaining confidentiality, as revealed in Figure 2 below, but are also vital for ensuring message authenticity and integrity. Current symmetric algorithms, for example, AES are best suited for confidentiality and are typically reliable and very fast. As such, this implies that they are effective and efficient in authenticating the integrity, as well as the origin of the data sent from one computer system to another.

In AES, the scheme works just like the one for confidentiality. Alice in this case still utilizes the secret key that subsequently is used in generating a ciphertext that is typically meant for the whole plaintext as shown in Figure 1. The process entails adding a fixed size of the ciphertext to the plaintext in the encryption process, which is done before transmission. Therefore, this part of the ciphertext usually works as a message authentication code (MAC). On the other side, once Bob receives the encrypted message from Alice, he has the capability of controlling the data integrity by authenticating the MAC. Bob does this by using the secret key that was used by Alice in generating the ciphertext and then selecting the similar ciphertext portion of MAC and consequently comparing it with MAC received from Alice. After comparing, if the two MAC's match, then Bob is assured that the message has not been altered in the process of transmission from Alice as no one else knows the secret key. If the message had been altered, the MAC generated by Bob would not match the received MAC from Alice. For symmetric encryption, as well as the MAC property, both Bob and Alice should share the secret key before encryption, which is referred to as key management or key exchange problem.

Symmetric encryption is an ordered quintet (P, C, K, E, D), where

• P is the plaintext.
• C is the cryptotext.
• K is the finite keyspace.

For every key k K there has to be an encrypting (ek E) and a decrypting (dk D) functions. E is referred to as the encrypting function space and includes a totality of all encrypting functions while D is the decrypting function space that entails all possible functions that can be used for decrypting.

dk(ek(w)) = w holds for every message (block) w and key k.

As such, the encrypting function has to be injective to eliminate the possibility of encrypting two different plaintexts into a similar cryptotext. Encryption must always be random, with the encrypting function able to produce different crypto texts. However, encrypting functions do not have to always encompass the injective functions, as in instances of limited plaintexts corresponding to similar cryptotext and it becomes easy to the right one. Additionally, encryption procedures are usually based on the results in algebra (group theory, finite fields, and commutative algebra) or number theory.

Public Key Encryption

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman introduced the public key cryptography concept in 1976 for the sole purpose of solving the key management problem of symmetric encryption. Asymmetric encryption, which is also referred to as Public key encryption is a cryptosystem that entails using an algorithm to generate different keys (one public key and one private key) for the message sender and receiver to utilize for the encryption and decryption process. The private key is secret and never transmitted or shared. The public key encryption is facilitated by a mathematical function that is linked to the private key. This implies that an attacker has to factor in many parameters, making it computationally infeasible to decrypt the private key. The public key encryption scheme is shown in Figure 3.

An example is the RSA cryptographic algorithm that can provide confidentiality, key exchange, as well as authentication. The encryption process allows the transformation of the plaintext to ciphertext by utilizing one key, as well as an encryption algorithm. Plaintext is derived from the ciphertext using a decryption algorithm and a paired key.

The asymmetric encryption works as follows. Bob encrypts the message using a public key of Alice, which ensures confidentiality. Figure 3 shows that the message can only be decrypted by utilizing the secret key of Alice. To achieve authenticity, Alice encrypts the message with her own secret key that generates a digital signature. Bob then has to decrypt the message with the public key from Alice to ensure that Alice sent it and no one else as shown in Figure 3.

Cryptographic Voting Systems

Cryptography schemes are mainly for maintaining the desired functionality even under attacks or malicious attempts for making a system deviate from the desired functionality. As such, the cryptographic schemes for electronic voting should allow for a voting system to perform as desired, particularly in verifiability, coercion-resistance, receipt-freeness, fairness, eligibility, robustness, and privacy functionalities. To anonymize votes, three classical cryptographic techniques can be used: (a) homomorphic counters, (b) blind signatures, and (c) mixnets. These techniques are detailed as follows:

Homomorphic Encryption Functions

The homomorphic cryptographic technique entails a system where the encrypted sum of the encrypted values is easily retrieved or found without decrypting the values. Essentially, the encryption function (E) is termed as homomorphic particularly if one can obtain E(XY) from the provided E(x) and E(y) without the need of decrypting x or y for a particular operation termed . This is shown in Figure 4 below.

For instance, El-Gamal is an example that utilizes multiplicative homomorphism of an encryption function. A message with m1 encryption and another with m2 when multiplied, the result is the product encryption. In El-Gamal when two encrypted messages are multiplied, the randomization is added up in the exponent and the messages, m1 and m2 are multiplied, as shown below.

E (m1) E (m2) = E (m1 m2)

In addition to El-Gamal, RSA is another homomorphic cryptosystem. In RSA, after a plaintext P is encrypted into a ciphertext C, C can be multiplied with 2 and then decrypt 2C to obtain 2P. In this type of system, it would not be possible using normal symmetric ciphers, for example, DES and AES primarily because when multiplying an AES ciphertext with a 2 and then decrypting it would result in random values, and not P. As such, this is homomorphism through multiplication. However, there is yet to be a standardized fully homomorphic cryptosystem that features both addition and multiplication. For this reason, in a voting system that uses addition as a desirable property, using an El-Gamal cryptosystem variant is viable. The cryptosystem is discussed as follows.

El-Gamal Encryption

The scheme typically works as follows: two parameters that are explicitly known are selected, a prime q (512bit), as well as a large prime p (1024 bits),. In this cas...