A general and efficient countermeasure to relation attacks in mix-based e-voting

A mix network is an anonymous communication channel usually employed in e-voting applications. A relation attack is a serious threat to privacy of any mix network and can attack various mix networks in many ways. At present, there is no efficient countermeasure to relation attacks in general. In this paper, a novel countermeasure against relation attacks is proposed. It can prevent any relation attack in mix-based e-voting schemes. It adopts a new encryption algorithm specially designed to be robust against relation attacks. The new countermeasure does not need any costly operation and is more efficient than the existing countermeasures. The new countermeasure is applied to voting and shown to work effectively. It is illustrated to protect the existing mix-based e-voting schemes from any relation attack.