Sharing decryption in the context of voting or lotteries

Several public key cryptosystems with additional homomorphic properties have been proposed so far. They allow to perform computation with encrypted data without the knowledge of any secret information. In many applications, the ability to perform decryption, i.e. the knowledge of the secret key, gives a huge power. A classical way to reduce the trust in such a secret owner, and consequently to increase the security, is to share the secret between many entities in such a way that cooperation between them is necessary to decrypt. In this paper, we propose a distributed version of the Paillier cryptosystem presented at Eurocrypt '99. This shared scheme can for example be used in an electronic voting scheme or in a lottery where a random number related to the winning ticket has to be jointly chosen by all participants.