A practical quantum designated verifier signature scheme for E-voting applications

Although most of the quantum signatures can be verified by a designated receiver, they do not match the classical designated verifier signature since an indistinguishable signature cannot be efficiently simulated. To adapt quantum signatures in specific environments like E-voting and E-bidding, several quantum designated verifier signature (QDVS) schemes have been proposed. However, it is still too complicated and infeasible to implement existing QDVS schemes in practice. In this paper, we propose a practical QDVS scheme without entanglement for E-voting applications. It only involves the quantum processing part of the underlying quantum key distribution (QKD) to generate correlated key strings, which protects the communication against potential eavesdroppers. The proposed scheme can be easily and efficiently deployed over the existing QKD network without complicated quantum operations. We further show that our QDVS scheme satisfies the required main security requirements and has the capability against several common attacks.