Securing E-Petition: A Privacy-Preserving Fine-Grained Electronic Petition System for Health and Political Petitions

Xiangman Li, Yunke Liu, Jianbing Ni, Yuanyuan He

Abstract: E-petition has played an important role in health and politics that collects public opinions and requests a superior or an authority to take actions towards a health or political problem. However, this activity exposes the privacy of the signers who participate to express opinions. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving fine-grained e-petition system that supports attribute-based identity verification for signers, while protecting their privacy. By considering the target groups of signers in a specific health or political petition, an attribute policy is defined to ensure that only the signers with the attributes that satisfy the attribute policy can sign the petition. The fine-grained petition is better than the traditional e-petitions because it can improve the trustworthiness of the petition results via proactive signer selection. Moreover, the new petition system protects the identities of the signers by using the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system, such that the signers are anonymous in signing petitions. In addition, the proposed petition system supports the tracing of double-signing, a cheating behavior that an anonymous signer can submit more than one signature in a petition without being detected. Finally, we prove that the proposed petition system achieves the desirable security properties, including anonymity, unforgeability, and traceability, and demonstrate that the system is efficient to be implemented on the mobile devices.