Privacy Aware Data Aggregation with Application in Voting Systems

Turning raw data into informative insights is an essential procedure. When data is public, the aggregated information is trusted it can be reproduced. However, it is difficult to achieve trust when the data is private. An obvious example is the voting system where votes are kept in secret, yet everyone needs to trust the count. The problem is to achieve privacy and trust together.Traditional paper-based voting satisfy privacy because the voter's identity is detached from the ballot. However, trust is not satisfied. It relies on the fact that a considerable change in the count requires a large number of election staff to be involved (which is difficult to achieve). Apart from being expensive to perform, post-election protests show that paper-based voting is not trusted as claimed. Paper-based voting remains the only effective solution as it is much more difficult to address privacy-trust problem in electronic voting. Advanced technologies in digital security (i.e. homomorphic encryption, block chain, etc.) have been widely used to address this problem [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].This article introduces a novel approach that satisfies both trust and privacy in the aggregation of private data. Tow implementations of the proposed approach for the voting system are also described. In the proposed method, each party encrypts its data and publishes the encrypted data publicly. Aggregation on encrypted data results in decrypted information without the need for decryption process.