Voting Protocol Research Articles

Practical I-Voting on Stellar Blockchain

In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving i-voting system based on the public Stellar Blockchain network. We argue that the proposed system satisfies all requirements stated for a robust i-voting system including transparency, verifiability, and voter anonymity. The practical architecture of the system abstracts a voter from blockchain technology used underneath. To keep user privacy, we propose a privacy-first protocol that protects voter anonymity. Additionally, high throughput and low transaction fees allow handling large scale voting at low costs. As a result we built an open-source, cheap, and secure system for i-voting that uses public blockchain, where everyone can participate and verify the election process without the need to trust a central authority. The main contribution to the field is a method based on a blind signature used to construct reliable voting protocol. The proposed method fulfills all requirements defined for i-voting systems, which is challenging to achieve altogether.

Towards an open and decentralized case law curation ecosystem.

Case law is the term that refers to reports of past court decisions. It is considered an essential source of law, vital for legal professionals. Existing case law services are currently centralized, with an entity having complete control over the data and often charging fees for its access and other adding value services. This paper attempts to leverage the potential of blockchain technology in order to develop a public and decentralized platform that allows the submission of court decisions in a decentralized database and employs a network of curators who offer their validation, classification, and evaluation. Specifically, we design, analyze and implement AnyCase, a proof-of-concept prototype system on the Ethereum platform. We focus on the establishment of a sybil-resistant voting protocol used for reaching agreement and the development of a tokenized economy that incentivizes participation. Our preliminary analysis indicates that, besides being decentralized, AnyCase has the potential to compete with existing centralized systems in several other aspects.

ВДОСКОНАЛЕНА ПОЛІНОМІАЛЬНО-СКЛАДНА АТАКА ВІДНОВЛЕННЯ ВІДКРИТОГО ТЕКСТУ НА РАНЦЕВИЙ ШИФР НА ОСНОВІ МАТРИЦЬ

Asymmetric ciphers are widely used to ensure the confidentiality of data transmission via insecure channels. These cryptosystems allow the interacting parties to create a shared secret key for a symmetric cipher in such a way that an eavesdropper gets no information useful for cryptanalysis. Network security protocols that use asymmetric ciphers include TLS, S/MIME, OpenPGP, Tor, and many others. Some of the asymmetric encryption schemes are homomorphic, that is, that they allow calculations on encrypted data to be performed without preliminary decryption. The aforesaid property makes possible using these cryptosystems not only for symmetric key establishment but also in several areas of application, in particular in secret voting protocols and cloud computing. The matrix-based knapsack cipher is a new additively homomorphic asymmetric encryption scheme, which is based on the properties of isomorphic transformations of the inner direct product of diagonal subgroups of a general linear group over a Galois field. Unlike classic knapsack encryption schemes, the cryptographic strength of this cipher depends on the computational complexity of the multidimensional discrete logarithm problem. Despite some useful properties, further research into the cryptographic strength of the matrix-based knapsack cipher has found serious drawbacks inherent in this cryptographic scheme. In the given paper an improved polynomial-time plaintext-recovery attack on the matrix-based knapsack cipher is proposed. Applying this cryptanalytic method requires only public information and has time complexity O(t1.34), where t denotes the decryption time of the attacked cryptosystem. The aforementioned attack is more productive and easier to implement in software in comparison with the original one. The advantages of the proposed method are due to using in its algorithm the simple and relatively fast matrix trace operation instead of more complex and slower transformations.

Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 and e-Voting Protocol Design

The Corona pandemic has created a push towards digitization in a number of fields, not least in the public sector including democratic processes. This of course includes an increased interest in e-voting via the Internet. The Council of Europe has a long-standing history of work in the field including two Recommendations – (2004)11 and (2017)5 – which have become the de facto yardstick against which every e-voting system is measured. Rec(2017)5 builds on a decade of experience with e-voting and particularly strengthens two concepts important in any electronic voting system: Voting secrecy and auditability/verifiability. This has distinct implications for the design of e-voting protocols. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact on what arguably are the most popular voting protocol families, envelope and token protocols. How does the modified Recommendation impact on the viability of protocols and protocol design? The paper first presents the Council of Europe Recommendation and the technical issues it addresses. Then a model is introduced to assess a voting protocol against the Recommendation; a typical envelope and a token protocol are assessed in view of the model and finally the two assessments are compared including policy recommendations for a path to e-voting implementation.

NetVote: A Strict-Coercion Resistance Re-Voting Based Internet Voting Scheme with Linear Filtering

This paper proposes NetVote, an internet voting protocol where usability and ease in deployment are a priority. We introduce the notion of strict coercion resistance, to distinguish between vote-buying and coercion resistance. We propose a protocol with ballot secrecy, practical everlasting privacy, verifiability and strict coercion resistance in the re-voting setting. Coercion is mitigated via a random dummy vote padding strategy to hide voting patterns and make re-voting deniable. This allows us to build a filtering phase with linear complexity, based on zero knowledge proofs to ensure correctness while maintaining privacy of the process. Voting tokens are formed by anonymous credentials and pseudorandom identifiers, achieving practical everlasting privacy, where even if dealing with a future computationally unbounded adversary, vote intention is still hidden. It is not assumed for voters to own cryptographic keys prior to the election, nor store cryptographic material during the election. This property allows voters not only to vote multiple times, but also from different devices each time, granting the voter a vote-from-anywhere experience. This paper builds on top of the paper published in CISIS’19. In this version, we modify the filtering. Moreover, we formally define the padding technique, which allows us to perform the linear filtering scheme. Similarly we provide more details on the protocol itself and include a section of the security analysis, where we include the formal definitions of strict coercion resistance and a game based definition of practical everlasting privacy. Finally, we prove that NetVote satisfies them all.

Novel Quantum Voting Protocol with Eight-Qubit Cluster Entangled State

Based on an eight-qubit cluster entangled state, a novel quantum voting protocol is put forward, where the voting message of any eligible voter Bob can be transferred to the teller David with the help of multiple supervisors Alicej(j = 3, 4, ∗). The anonymous authentication between voters and the vote management center (VMC) provides the anonymity of Bob’s identity and voting contents. The supervision in the whole voting process can avoid the teller David’s dishonest behaviour. The quantum one-time pad encryption and quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols are adopted to guarantee the unconditional security of our proposed voting protocol. Additionally, the teller Bob can successfully recover the voting message with probability 1 and our protocol only depends on Bell measurement and single particle measurement, which makes our quantum voting protocol more practical and easy to implement with currently available technology.

A distributed networked system for secure publicly verifiable self-tallying online voting

For successful electronic voting (e-voting), it is critically important to ensure the security, privacy and verifiability of all steps. This paper uses Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to achieve these goals and provide protection against malicious adversaries with administrative access. We introduce a Distributed SGX Networked System (DSGXNS). It connects one or several SGXs and the bulletin board of the election. We propose and investigate a DSGXNS-based secure, publicly verifiable and self-tallying online voting protocol. Each cast vote is uploaded to the DSGXNS via a secure communication channel built after a remote attestation. The validity of submissions is verified inside the SGX enclaves and legitimate votes are encrypted there. For end-to-end voter verification, a new encryption mechanism is proposed. It prevents confidentiality breaches and enables everyone to verify the validity of submissions and the outcome, which can be self-tallied using a homomorphic property. It maintains confidentiality because even the system administrators or malicious adversaries gaining administrative access cannot read data in the SGX enclaves. Every voter can verify all steps of the election and tally the cast ballots. Our theoretical analysis and experiments show that the protocol is secure and efficient.

Blockchain-Based Voting System

The advantage of electronic voting is that the voting is convenient and quick and the counting of votes is simple, but it is difficult to meet the requirements of both high security and large-scale application. This paper proposes an electronic voting protocol and system based on blockchain technology. The blockchain layer will use the P2P network to build a distributed database, use digital signature algorithms and encryption technologies to ensure that the data cannot be tampered with, and consensus algorithms to ensure the consistency of the data in the network, and use time stamping technology to connect the data blocks end to end chain structure preservation. And the application of Ethereum fully integrates different functional modules as a whole, achieves consensus through a proof-of-work mechanism, miners mine, and the new network protocol is formulated to achieve synchronous operation of the blockchain. Finally, the smart contract deployed on Ethereum runs on an Ethereum-specific virtual machine, and interacts with the underlying blockchain through the Ethereum virtual machine and RPC interface.

Blockchain-Based Self-Tallying Voting System with Software Updates in Decentralized IoT

IoT revolutionizes academia as well as industry. An increasing number of interconnected smart devices are gradually changing the urban lifestyle, among which, voting machines are one of the most widely used smart devices. However, the existing voting protocols for IoT are barely satisfactory, in the sense that most of them are centralized and subject to fairness issues. Moreover, the embedded softwares in voting machines are susceptible to internal vulnerabilities and external attacks. To address these issues, in this article, we propose a framework of a blockchain-based self-tallying voting system with software updates in decentralized IoT, which is fully decentralized and fair. In the proposed system, everyone can compute the final election results by collecting the ballots on the blockchain with equal privilege. Voting machines achieve self-tallying voting functionality in decentralized IoT systems and each entity in the system can obtain the voting results. Vendors deploy smart contracts to publish new patches securely and reliably. We implement a prototype of the proposed framework on laptops and mobile phones respectively to demonstrate its practicality.

Blockchain voting: Publicly verifiable online voting protocol without trusted tallying authorities

In organizing elections, a difficult problem is to achieve trust of all voters in the tallying process. Practical elections often lead to recounting of the submitted votes and raise questions about the validity of many submitted votes. There are even situations, when the opposition raises concerns about the validity of the whole election process due to insufficient transparency in the verification of the votes and in tallying. To solve this problem, the present paper proposes a new voting protocol based on the blockchain technology. There are several main advantages of the protocol. It does not rely on a trusted tallying authority. All votes are submitted with complete proofs of validity and are available for public access in an encrypted form. We propose a new encryption mechanism to guarantee that nobody can decrypt the votes, but everyone can verify the validity of the votes as well as the outcome of the tallying process by using the homomorphic property of the encryption. This makes the results of the election publicly verifiable. Our protocol enables all voters to store, verify, and tally all submitted votes which are added to a blockchain database. They allow every voter to rank each candidate by assigning different scores to them, rather than voting for only one candidate. Each vote is encrypted using a new encryption mechanism before submission. For each encrypted score in the vote, proofs are generated and stored. Everyone can use these proofs to verify the correctness and the eligibility of each submission without decrypting the content of the vote. This ensures the validity of the submitted votes in the counting process and at the same time maintains confidentiality. The security and performance analyses included in this paper demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed protocol for implementation in real elections.

Design and practical implementation of verify‐your‐vote protocol

SummaryOne of the most critical properties that must be ensured to have a secure electronic voting is verifiability. Political parties, observers, and especially voters want to be able to verify that all eligible votes are cast as intended and counted as cast without compromising votes secrecy or voters privacy. Over the past few decades, an important number of e‐voting protocols attempt to deal with this issue by using cryptographic techniques and/or a public bulletin board. Recently, some blockchain‐based e‐voting systems have been proposed, but were not found practical in the real world, because they do not support situations with large numbers of candidates and voters. In this article, we design and implement a verifiable blockchain‐based online voting protocol, called verify‐your‐vote . Our protocol ensures several security properties thanks to some cryptographic primitives and blockchain technology. We also evaluate its performance in terms of time, cost, and the number of voters and candidates that can be supported.

A two authorities electronic vote scheme

In this paper we propose a new electronic multi-authority voting system based on blind signatures. We focus on the open problem of the efficiency of electronic voting systems. Most of the proposed systems rely on complex architectures or expensive proofs, in this work we aim to reduce the time-complexity of the voting process, both for the voter and the authorities involved. Our system is focused on simplicity and it is based on the assumption of two unrelated entities. This simplicity makes our approach scalable and flexible to multiple kinds of elections. We propose a method that limits the number of authorities to only 2 of them; we reduce the overall number of modular operations; and, propose a method which cut downs the interactions needed to cast a vote. The result is a voting protocol whose complexity scales linearly with the number of votes.

A electronic voting protocol based on blockchain and homomorphic signcryption

SummaryCompared with traditional voting methods, electronic voting can effectively avoid the phenomenon of fraud for personal gains in various links, it is faster and more accurate in the tallying stage. However, many electronic voting systems have many problems such as inability to verify ballots, easy to be forged, and low computing efficiency. We propose an electronic voting protocol based on homomorphic signcryption and blockchain. The protocol makes the voting process public through blockchain and replaces the traditional trusted third party with the smart contract. It uses the homomorphic encryption algorithm and the homomorphic signcryption algorithm to encrypt and sign the ballot and uses their aggregation properties to perform homomorphic tally on the encrypted votes. This not only reduces the excessive burden on the voters but also improves the voting efficiency. At the same time, it can satisfy the security of electronic voting, and the amount of calculation is small, so it is more convenient and flexible to use in large‐scale voting.

Bisimulations for verifying strategic abilities with an application to the ThreeBallot voting protocol

We propose a notion of alternating bisimulation for strategic abilities under imperfect information. The bisimulation preserves formulas of ATL⁎ for both the objective and subjective variants of the state-based semantics with imperfect information, which are commonly used in the modeling and verification of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we apply the theoretical result to the verification of coercion-resistance in the ThreeBallot voting system, a voting protocol that does not use cryptography. In particular, we show that natural simplifications of an initial model of the protocol are in fact bisimulations of the original model, and therefore satisfy the same ATL⁎ properties, including coercion-resistance. These simplifications allow the model-checking tool MCMAS to terminate on models with a larger number of voters and candidates, compared with the initial model.

Discordant Voting Protocols for Cyclically Linked Agents

Voting protocols, such as the push and the pull protocol, model the behavior of people during an election. These processes have been studied in distributed computing in peer-to-peer networks, and to describe how viruses or rumors spread in a community. We determine the asymptotic behavior of the runtime of discordant linear protocols on the cycle graph and the probability for each consensus to win.

Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System with Special Ballot and Block Structures that Complies with Indonesian Principle of Voting

Blockchain technology could be implemented not only in digital currency, but also in other fields. One such implementation is in democratic life, namely voting. This research focuses on designing a blockchain-based electronic voting system for medium to large-scale usage that complies with law, specifically voting principles in Indonesia. In this research, we proposed the following: a ballot design as block transaction employing UUID version 4, a modified block structure using SHA3-256 hash algorithm, and a voting protocol. The minimum length of a ballot is 43 bytes (excluding ECDSA signature) if one character is used as candidate’s identifier and timestamp is stored as integer. We built a simulation program using Python-based Django web framework to cast 10,000 votes and mine them into blocks. Tampered transactions in each block could be detected and restored by synchronizing data with another node. We also evaluated the proposed system. By using this system, voters can exercise voting principles in Indonesia: direct, public, free, confidential, honest, and fair.

An anonymous electronic voting scheme for multiple elections using a variant of the ElGamal digital signature

In this paper we present an electronic voting protocol valid for multiple elections. The work is based on a variant of the ElGamal digital signature. Our proposed method allows to run t elections using the same parameters. We use the RSA blind signature for all transactions in the voting process. Security and complexity of the presented scheme are analysed.

Electronic secret voting system using decentralized technologies developing principles

The paper reveals the prospects of using electronic trust services, in particular electronic signature services, for building voting systems. The advantages of such systems are described, as well as problematic issues related to the implementation of remote voting systems in practice. The most famous existing electronic voting protocols based on classical principles are analyzed. Their shortcomings and difficulties in implementation are highlighted. We present new principles for building an electronic voting system. In particular, the paper proposes a two-level architecture of a decentralized electronic voting system, which consists of a decentralized public key infrastructure that combines trusted certification authorities and a decentralized voting system that integrates the distributed representative offices of an electronic voting agency. Also, an adapted protocol of electronic voting is proposed. Unlike the analyzed protocols, the new approach is based on a decentralized public key infrastructure. The paper shows how, using DLT technology, it is possible to ensure that the necessary requirements for system stability are met without introducing significant redundancy into the interaction protocol of all interested parties. Deploying a decentralized electronic voting system based on a decentralized public key infrastructure allows voters to use existing key pairs. The proposed electronic voting protocol is a modification of the Nurmi-Salom-Santin protocol without the need for special bodies to form voter lists. It also allows preserving the anonymity of voters without the use of blind signatures.

Implementation of quantum secret sharing and quantum binary voting protocol in the IBM quantum computer

Quantum secret sharing is a way to share secret messages among the clients in a group with complete security. For the first time, Hillery et al. (Phys Rev A 59:1829, 1999) proposed the quantum version of the classical secret sharing protocol using GHZ states. Here, we implement the above quantum secret sharing protocol in 'IBM Q 5 Tenerife' quantum processor and compare the experimentally obtained results with the theoretically predicted ones. Further, a new quantum binary voting protocol is proposed and implemented in the 14-qubit 'IBM Q 14 Melbourne' quantum processor. The results are analyzed through the technique of quantum state tomography, and the fidelity of states is calculated for a different number of executions made in the device.

A Multivariate Blind Ring Signature Scheme

Abstract Blind signatures are an important and useful tool in designing digital cash schemes and electronic voting protocols. Ring signatures on the other hand provide the anonymity of the signer within the ring of users. In order to fit to some real-life applications, it is useful to combine both protocols to create a blind ring signature scheme, which utilizes all of their features. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a post-quantum blind ring signature scheme. Our scheme is constructed based on multivariate public key cryptography, which is one of the main candidates for post-quantum cryptography.