Quantum-based anonymity and secure veto

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.