Free and fair elections are indispensable to quantify the sentiments of the populace for forming the government of representatives in democratic countries. Due to its procedural variation from country to country and complexity, to maneuverer, it is a challenging task. Since the Orthodox paper-based electoral systems are slow and error-prone, therefore, a secure and efficient electoral system always remained a key area of research. Although a lot of literature is available on this topic. However, due to reported anomalies and weaknesses in American and France election in 2016, it once again has become a pivotal subject of research. In this article, we proposed a new secure and efficient electronic voting scheme based on public key cryptosystem dubbed as Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU). Furthermore, an efficient and robust three factors authentication protocol based on a personalized memorable password, a smartcard, and bioHash is proposed to validate the legitimacy of a voter for casting a legal vote. NTRU based blind signatures are used to preserve the anonymity and privacy of vote and voters, whereas the proficiency of secure and efficient counting of votes is achieved through NTRU based homomorphic tally. Non-coercibility and individual verifiability are attained through Mark Pledge scheme. The proposed applied electronic voting scheme is, secure, transparent and efficient for large scale elections.

No abstract

Transport Layer Security (TLS) provides reliable and in-order communication. However due to its retransmission behavior it causes delay that is inappropriate for real time applications. Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) can be used as an efficient alternate for securing the real time communication because of its unreliable and out of order features. Real-time secure multicast communication is an effective technique which mainly focuses on 'key distribution', 'forward and backward security', 'participant's authentication' and scalability. An extensive research is available for providing security to peer-to-peer (P2P) application using DTLS. However, no specific efforts have been made regarding its use for securing multicast communication. This paper not only reviews the structure of DTLS protocol in terms of security but also proposes a secure reliable multicast scheme using DTLS.

No abstract

Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol is a vibrant component of Internet Security protocol (IPSec). It plays a vital role to accomplish the tasks of negotiation and establishment of security parameters, generation and management of cryptographic keys, mutual authentication of participating peers and establishing security associations. Since the IPSec security relies primarily on secure IKE, therefore the review and analysis of IKE versions is essential prior to their deployment in IPSec. This paper not only reviews the versions 1 and 2 of IKE but also presents a comparative analysis of these key management protocols.