Multi-level multi-secret sharing scheme for decentralized e-voting in cloud computing

The cryptosystem-based data privacy preserving methods employ high computing power of cloud servers, where the main feature is to allow resource sharing and provide multi-user independent services. Therefore, to achieve the rapid allocation and release of resource sharing in cloud computing, decentralized cryptographic protocols need to be proposed for multi-user consensus systems. In this work, we first present a multi-secret sharing scheme with multi-level access structure, where the secret reconstruction algorithm satisfies the additive homomorphism. The secret sharing scheme needs no trusted third parties and any user can play the role of dealer. In the designing, multiple target secrets are independently shared, where each subset of users forms a sub-access structure and shares one target secret only with a short secret share. This scheme is efficient and unconditionally secure. Furthermore, based on the multi-level access structures, a decentralized multi-role e-voting protocol is designed using Chinese Remainder Theorem, where each role's election is associated with one sub-access structure. The voters employ a shared parameter to blind the sum of ballot values. Meanwhile, the e-voting scheme supports a public verification for the final election results. Compared with the existing e-voting protocols, our e-voting system does not require any authority center and the cloud server runs vote counting. And our e-voting scheme does not need any high-complexity computational cost operation such as module exponential operation, etc. Finally, the common feature of Blockchain and Ad Hoc networks is decentralized. Thus the main idea of this protocol without a trusted third party can be used to achieve a secure consensus among multiple nodes in Blockchain and Ad Hoc network, meanwhile, the consensus results can be verified. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.