Improving the Performance of Cryptographic Voting Protocols

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 rec- ommended 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.