Improving the Performance of Cryptographic Voting Protocols

Abstract

Cryptographic voting protocols often rely on methods that require a large number of modular exponentiations. Corresponding performance bottlenecks may appear both on the server and the client side. Applying existing optimization techniques is often mentioned and recommended in the literature, but their potential has never been analyzed in depth. In this paper, we investigate existing algorithms for computing fixed-base exponentiations and product exponentiations. Both of them appear frequently in voting protocols. We also explore the potential of applying small-exponent techniques. It turns out that using these techniques in combination, the overall computation time can be reduced by two or more orders of magnitude.