Improving Security on Election Results Data Transmission via Cloud Using Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Elections in recent years have become topical issues and characterized by violence and conflicts leading to loss of lives and properties. The integrity and confidentiality of the declared collated results have been questioned by individuals and organisations with keen interest in the outcomes of every election. Different countries have adopted different Election Results Management Systems (RMS) to help present a credible, fair and transparent election results. These systems adopted are not without criticisms and suspicions. This research paper has presented various factors that need to be considered when selecting a Results Management System (RMS) for elections. A cloud-based using a Hybrid homomorphic encryption approach is proposed in managing the election results data security and transmission. The proposed scheme has demonstrated effectiveness in handling data integrity, data confidentiality, data privacy and access control. The proposed scheme presented has enhanced the security of election results data against Chosen Ciphetext Attacks (CCA) and Denial of Service (DoS) as well as other cyber related attacks. The time required for the entire election data encryption, transmission, decryption, upload time and download time has been greatly enhanced with the proposed system. The proposed system workflow algorithm, key generation algorithm, encryption algorithm and decryption have been presented in this research paper. The outcome of the research work indicates that only 0.00078 seconds is required to generate keys for about 100 users. About 0.705 seconds and 0.863 seconds is required for the encryption and decryption of a 500MB election results data. It was observed that the overall election results data transmission time is about 51.779 seconds which is less than one minute (60 seconds) for about 500MB data size of the election results data. This paper makes a case for the adoption and implementation of the proposed system since it performs better in terms of securing the election results data and transmission time in the cloud environment.