Secure digital voting system based on blockchain technology

Electronic voting or e-voting has been used in varying forms since 1970s with fundamental benefits over paper based systems such as increased efficiency and reduced errors. However, there remain challenges to achieve wide spread adoption of such systems especially with respect to improving their resilience against potential faults. Blockchain is a disruptive technology of current era and promises to improve the overall resilience of e-voting systems. This paper presents an effort to leverage benefits of blockchain such as cryptographic foundations and transparency to achieve an effective scheme for e-voting. The proposed scheme conforms to the fundamental requirements for e-voting schemes and achieves end-to-end verifiability. The paper presents details of the proposed e-voting scheme along with its implementation using Multichain platform. The paper presents in-depth evaluation of the scheme which successfully demonstrates its effectiveness to achieve an end-to-end verifiable e-voting scheme

On Some Incompatible Properties of Voting Schemes

In this paper, we study the problem of simultaneously achieving several security properties, for voting schemes, without non-standard assumptions. More specifically, we focus on the universal veriability of the computation of the tally, on the unconditional privacy/anonymity of the votes, and on the receipt-freeness properties, for the most classical election processes. Under usual assumptions and efficiency requirements, we show that a voting system that wants to publish the final list of the voters who actually voted, and to compute the number of times each candidate has been chosen, we cannot achieve: - universal verifiability of the tally (UV) and unconditional privacy of the votes (UP) simultaneously, unless all the registered voters actually vote; - universal verifiability of the tally (UV) and receipt- freeness (RF), unless private channels are available between the voters and/or the voting authorities

Efficiency Comparison of Various Approaches in E-Voting Protocols

In order to ensure the security of remote Internet voting, the systems that are currently proposed make use of complex cryptographic techniques. Since these techniques are often computationally extensive, efficiency becomes an issue. Identifying the most efficient Internet voting system is a non-trivial task -- in particular for someone who does not have a sufficient knowledge on the systems that currently exist, and on the cryptographic components that constitute those systems. Aside from these components, the efficiency of Internet voting also depends on various parameters, such as expected number of participating voters and ballot complexity. In this paper we propose a tool for evaluating the efficiency of different approaches for an input scenario, that could be of use to election organizers deciding how to implement the voting system

BVOT: Self-Tallying Boardroom Voting with Oblivious Transfer

A boardroom election is an election with a small number of voters carried out with public communications. We present BVOT, a self-tallying boardroom voting protocol with ballot secrecy, fairness (no tally information is available before the polls close), and dispute-freeness (voters can observe that all voters correctly followed the protocol). BVOT works by using a multiparty threshold homomorphic encryption system in which each candidate is associated with a masked unique prime. Each voter engages in an oblivious transfer with an untrusted distributor: the voter selects the index of a prime associated with a candidate and receives the selected prime in masked form. The voter then casts their vote by encrypting their masked prime and broadcasting it to everyone. The distributor does not learn the voter's choice, and no one learns the mapping between primes and candidates until the audit phase. By hiding the mapping between primes and candidates, BVOT provides voters with insufficient information to carry out effective cheating. The threshold feature prevents anyone from computing any partial tally---until everyone has voted. Multiplying all votes, their decryption shares, and the unmasking factor yields a product of the primes each raised to the number of votes received. In contrast to some existing boardroom voting protocols, BVOT does not rely on any zero-knowledge proof; instead, it uses oblivious transfer to assure ballot secrecy and correct vote casting. Also, BVOT can handle multiple candidates in one election. BVOT prevents cheating by hiding crucial information: an attempt to increase the tally of one candidate might increase the tally of another candidate. After all votes are cast, any party can tally the votes