Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations

In this paper we describe the design components of the heterogenous multi-chain protocol Polkadot and explain how these components help Polkadot address some of the existing shortcomings of blockchain technologies. At present, a vast number of blockchain projects have been introduced and employed with various features that are not necessarily designed to work with each other. This makes it difficult for users to utilise a large number of applications on different blockchain projects. Moreover, with the increase in number of projects the security that each one is providing individually becomes weaker. Polkadot aims to provide a scalable and interoperable framework for multiple chains with pooled security that is achieved by the collection of components described in this paper

Blockchain based voting system for Jordan parliament elections

Covid-19 pandemic has stressed more than any-time before the necessity for conducting election processes in an electronic manner, where voters can cast their votes remotely with complete security, privacy, and trust. The different voting schema in different countries makes it very difficult to utilize a one fits all system. This paper presents a blockchain based voting system (BBVS) applied to the Parliamentary elections system in the country of Jordan. The proposed system is a private and centralized blockchain implemented in a simulated environment. The proposed BBVS system implements a hierarchical voting process, where a voter casts votes at two levels, one for a group, and the second for distinct members within the group. This paper provides a novel blockchain based e-Voting system, which proves to be transparent and yet secure. This paper utilizes synthetic voter benchmarks to measure the performance, accuracy and integrity of the election process. This research introduced and implemented new algorithms and methods to maintain acceptable performance both at the time of creating the blockchain(s) for voters and candidates as well as at the time of casting votes by voters

Role of Digitalization in Election Voting Through Industry 4.0 Enabling Technologies

The election voting system is one of the essential pillars of democracy to elect the representative for ruling the country. In the election voting system, there are multiple areas such as detection of fake voters, illegal activities for fake voting, booth capturing, ballot monitoring, etc., in which Industry 4.0 can be adopted for the application of real-time monitoring, intelligent detection, enhancing security and transparency of voting and other data during the voting. According to previous research, there are no studies that have presented the significance of industry 4.0 technologies for improving the electronic voting system from a sustainability standpoint. To overcome the research gap, this study aims to present literature about Industry 4.0 technologies on the election voting system. We examined individual industry enabling technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) that have the potential to strengthen the infrastructure of the election voting system. Based upon the analysis, the study has discussed and recommended suggestions for the future scope such as: IoT and cloud computing-based automatic systems for the detection of fake voters and updating voter attendance after the verification of the voter identity; AI-based illegal, and fake voting activities detection through vision node; blockchain-inspired system for the data integrity in between voter and election commission and robotic assistance system for guiding the voter and also for detecting disputes in the premises of election booth

From Blockchain to Internet-based Voting

Blockchain has been one of the hottest topics among the state-of-the-art technologies. As the enabling technology for Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency, blockchain is an append-only distributed ledger that is virtually impossible to attack. Hence, blockchain holds great promises as the fundamental technology to enable Internet-based electronic voting. However, Internet-based voting has additional requirements than what monetary transactions such as Bitcoin have to offer. In this thesis, we discuss the key differences of a blockchain-based voting system with digital currencies. In this context we also highlight the requirements, review existing proposed solutions, and outline possible improvements. Specifically, we propose several schemes on how to tackle various issues such as authentication, privacy, transparency, scalability, safety, as well as several other practical aspects of the platform. Most importantly, a blockchain-based voting system needs to ensure that the prospect of tampering with the election result is to a large extent eliminated. At the same time, the voting platform should have proper performance characteristics, i.e. sufficient throughput, for a voting of large magnitude such as a presidential election. Being heavily linked together, security and performance should be investigated in a unified framework to capture the interaction effects between the two. To address this concern, for the first time, we will study the performance and security implications of the blockchain voting system in a quantitative manner, using a blockchain simulator developed by researchers at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. In our analysis, we will specifically investigate the stale block rate and relative mining share of the dishonest network, as the central security measures, as a function of important network parameters that determine the throughput of the network, i.e. block size and block interval. Ultimately, we focus on selfish mining and eclipse attacks as the most critical threats to the integrity of the blockchain voting in order to find the optimal network parameters