In the second decade of the 21st century, blockchain definitely became one of the most trending computational technologies. This research aims to question the feasibility and suitability of using blockchain technology within e-voting systems, regarding both technical and non-technical aspects. In today's world, although the course of this spreading is considerably slow, several countries already use means of e-voting due to many social and economic reasons, which we further investigated. Nevertheless, the number of countries offering various e-government solutions, apart from e-voting, is significantly high. E-voting systems, naturally, require much more attention and assurance regarding potential security and anonymity issues, since voting is one of the few extremely critical governmental processes. Nevertheless, e-voting is not purely a governmental service, but many companies and nonprofit organizations would benefit the cost-efficiency, scalability, remote accessibility, and ease of use that it provides. Blockchain technology is claimed to be able to address some, obviously not all, important security concerns, including anonymity, confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. The analysis results presented in this article mostly confirm these claims.
Decentralized electronic voting solutions represent a promising advancement in electronic voting. One of the e-voting paradigms, the self-tallying scheme, offers strong protection of the voters' privacy while making the whole voting process verifiable. Decentralized smart contract platforms became interesting practical instantiation of the immutable bulletin board that this scheme requires to preserve its properties. Existing smart contract-based approaches employing the self-tallying scheme (such as OVN or BBB-Voting) are only suitable for a boardroom voting scenario due to their scalability …
Remote voting has become more critical in recent years, especially after the Covid-19 outbreak. Blockchain technology and its benefits like decentralization, security, and transparency have encouraged remote voting systems to use blockchains. Analysis of existing solutions reveals that anonymity, robustness, and scalability are common problems in blockchain-based election systems. In this work, we propose ElectAnon, a blockchain-based, ranked-choice election protocol focusing on anonymity, robustness, and scalability. ElectAnon achieves anonymity by enabling voters to cast their votes via zero…
In this paper we propose a comprehensive and scalable framework to build secure-by-design e-voting systems. Decentralization, transparency, determinism, and untamperability of votes are granted by dedicated smart contracts on a blockchain, while voter authenticity and anonymity are achieved through (provable secure) linkable ring signatures. These, in combination with suitable smart contract constraints, also grant protection from double voting. Our design is presented in detail, focusing on its security guarantees and the design choices that allow it to scale to a large number of voters. Fina…
Today's blockchain landscape is severely fragmented as more and more heterogeneous blockchain platforms have been developed in recent years. These blockchain platforms are not able to interact with each other or with the outside world since only little emphasis is placed on the interoperability between them. Already proposed solutions for blockchain interoperability such as naive relay or oracle solutions are usually not broadly applicable since they are either too expensive to operate or very resource-intensive. For that reason, we propose a blockchain interoperability oracle that follows a v…
Homomorphic encryption and blockchain technology are regarded as two significant technologies for improving e-voting systems. In this paper, we suggest a novel e-voting system using homomorphic encryption and blockchain technology that is focused on encrypting voter data. By encrypting voter information rather than cast votes, the system enables various statistical analyses regarding the vote result while securing the credibility, privacy, and verifiability of overall e-voting system. We checked the efficiency of the overall system by comparing the speed of the proposed system with the speed o…
In democratic countries such as India, voting is a fundamental right given to citizens of their countries. Citizens need to physically present and cast their vote in ballot-paper-based voting systems. Most of the citizens fail to fulfill this constraint and have stayed away from their fundamental duty. Electronic-voting systems are often considered one efficient alternative in such situations. Blockchain Technology is an emerging technology that can provide a real solution as it is characterized by immutable, transparent, anonymous, and decentralized properties. This paper presents a security …
This paper proposes a simple voting protocol based on quantum blockchain. Besides being simple, our voting protocol is anonymous, binding, non-reusable, verifiable, eligible, fair and self-tallying. Our protocol is also realizable by the current technology.
Towards Secure Decentralized Applications and Consensus Protocols in Blockchains (on Selfish Mining, Undercutting Attacks, DAG-Based Blockchains, E-Voting, Cryptocurrency Wallets, Secure-Logging, and CBDC)
Voting forms the most important tool for arriving at a decision in any institution. The changing needs of the civilization currently demands a practical yet secure electronic voting system, but any flaw related to the applied voting technology can lead to tampering of the results with the malicious outcomes. Currently, blockchain technology due to its transparent structure forms an emerging area of investigation for the development of voting systems with a far greater security. However, various apprehensions are yet to be conclusively resolved before using blockchain in high stakes elections. …
Technology has positive impacts on many aspects of our social life. Designing a 24hour globally connected architecture enables ease of access to a variety of resources and services. Furthermore, technology like Internet has been a fertile ground for innovation and creativity. One of such disruptive innovation is blockchain -- a keystone of cryptocurrencies. The blockchain technology is presented as a game changer for many of the existing and emerging technologies/services. With its immutability property and decentralised architecture, it is taking centre stage in many services as an equalisati…
Thanks to built-in immutability and persistence, the blockchain is often seen as a promising technology to certify information. However, when the information does not originate from the blockchain itself, its correctness cannot be taken for granted. To address this limitation, blockchain oracles -- services that validate external information before storing it in a blockchain -- were introduced. In particular, when the validation cannot be automated, oracles rely on humans that collaboratively cross-check external information. In this paper, we present DeepThought, a distributed human-based ora…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. Most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, in which the presence of a cloud server is mandatory. However, centralized frameworks suffer from the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology of Blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, such as a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alte…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in using online technologies to design protocols for secure electronic voting. The main challenges include vote privacy and anonymity, ballot irrevocability and transparency throughout the vote counting process. The introduction of the blockchain as a basis for cryptocurrency protocols, provides for the exploitation of the immutability and transparency properties of these distributed ledgers. In this paper, we discuss possible uses of the blockchain technology to implement a secure and fair voting system. In particular, we introduce a secret share-ba…
Since 2004, different research was handling the challenges in the centralized voting systems, e-voting protocols and recently the decentralized voting. So electronic voting puts forward some difficulties regarding the voter anonymity, the secure casting of the votes and to prevent the voting process from frauding. The Decentralized property of the technology called "blockchain" could have the solution for many of the challenges in voting research area and brings a new secure mechanism of safe and transparent voting. In this paper, a broad comparison between ongoing voting systems has studied b…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain. Yet, these protocols remain vulnerable to faults caused by validators who abstain either accidentally or maliciously. To protect against such faults while retaining the PoS selection and reward allocation schemes, we study weighted voting in validator committees. We formalize the block creation process and introduce validators' voting profiles which we update …
Traditional elections satisfy neither citizens nor political authorities in recent years. They are not fully secure since it is easy to attack votes. It threatens also privacy and transparency of voters. Additionally, it takes too much time to count the votes. This paper proposes a solution using Blockchain to eliminate all the disadvantages of conventional elections. Security and data integrity of votes are absolutely provided theoretically. Voter privacy is another requirement that is ensured in the system. Lastly, the waiting time for results decreased significantly in the proposed Blockcha…
As computer vision is prevalently used for mail-in ballot processing and counting, it becomes a point of centralized trust in postal voting. We propose DVote, a prototype system of postal voting that provides decentralized trust in computer vision. With blockchain and layer-2 technologies, DVote decentralizes the computation and model training of computer vision to a group of scrutineers that hold the AnyTrust assumption, i.e., at least one member is honest. Consequently, the computational integrity is anchored to the trustworthiness of a large public blockchain such as Ethereum.
Voting is a very important issue which can be beneficial in term of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However, elections are surrounds with ballot forgery, coercion and multiple voting issues. Moreover, while giving votes, a person has to wait in a long queue and it is a very time consuming process. Blockchain is a distributed database in which data are shared with the participant of the node and each participant holds the same copy of the data. Blockchain has properties lik…
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have received significant interest in various areas beyond the financial sector, with profound applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), providing the means for creating truly trustless and secure solutions for IoT applications. Taking into account the weak security defences that the majority of IoT devices have, it is critical that a blockchain-based solution targeting the IoT is not only capable of addressing the many challenges IoT is facing, but also does not introduce other defects, in terms of performance, making its adoption hard to ach…
In a practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) blockchain network, the voting nodes may always leave the network while some new nodes can also enter the network, thus the number of voting nodes is constantly changing. Such a new PBFT with dynamic nodes is called a dynamic PBFT. Clearly, the dynamic PBFT can more strongly support the decentralization and distributed structure of blockchain. However, analyzing dynamic PBFT blockchain systems will become more interesting and challenging. In this paper, we propose a large-scale Markov modeling technique to analyze the dynamic PBFT voting processe…
Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology（密拉特工程技术学院）
This research study focuses primarily on Block-Chain-based voting systems, which facilitate participation in and administration of voting for voters, candidates, and officials. Because we used Block-Chain in the backend, which enables everyone to trace vote fraud, our system is incredibly safe. This paper approach any unique identification the Aadhar Card number or an OTP will be generated then user can utilise the voting system to cast his/her vote. A proposal for Bit-coin, a virtual currency system that is decided by a central authority for producing money, transferring ownership, and valida…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a committee of elected block producers. In theory, the smaller the committee, the faster the blockchain can reach consensus and the more it can scale. What's less clear, is whether such protocols ensure that honest committees can be consistently elected, given blockchain users typically have limited information on who to vote for. We show that the approval voting me…
Recently, many Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)-based blockchains have been widely used in decentralized applications, such as EOSIO, Tron, and Binance Smart Chain. Compared with traditional PoW-based blockchain systems, these systems achieve a higher transaction throughput and are well adapted to large-scale scenes in daily applications. Decentralization is a key element in blockchain networks. However, little is known about the evolution of decentralization in DPoS-based blockchain networks. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis on the decentralization of DPoS with data from up to 1…
A trusted electronic election system requires that all the involved information must go public, that is, it focuses not only on transparency but also privacy issues. In other words, each ballot should be counted anonymously, correctly, and efficiently. In this work, a lightweight E-voting system is proposed for voters to minimize their trust in the authority or government. We ensure the transparency of election by putting all message on the Ethereum blockchain, in the meantime, the privacy of individual voter is protected via an efficient and effective ring signature mechanism. Besides, the at…
Permissioned blockchains employ Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) to reach agreement on an ever-growing, linearly ordered log of transactions. A new paradigm, combined with decades of research in BFT SMR and blockchain (namely chained-BFT, or cBFT), has emerged for directly constructing blockchain protocols. Chained-BFT protocols have a unifying propose-vote scheme instead of multiple different voting phases with a set of voting and commit rules to guarantee safety and liveness. However, distinct voting and commit rules impose varying impacts on performance under d…
Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. In this paper, we proposed an Ethereum based eletronic voting (e-voting) protocol, Ques-Chain, which can ensure the authentication can be done without hurting confidentiality and the anonymity can be protected without problems of scams at the same time. Furthermore, the authors considered the wider usages Ques-Chain can be applied on, pointing out that it is able to process all kinds of messages and can be used in all fields with similar needs.
The suitability of a particular blockchain for a given use case depends mainly on the blockchain's functional and non-functional properties. Such properties may vary over time, and thus, a selected blockchain may become unsuitable for a given use case. This uncertainty may hinder the widespread adoption of blockchain technologies in general. To mitigate the impact of volatile blockchain properties, we propose a framework that monitors several blockchains, allows the user to define functional and non-functional requirements, determines the most appropriate blockchain, and enables the switchover…
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT) where data is shared among users connected over the internet. Transactions are data state changes on the blockchain that are permanently recorded in a secure and transparent way without the need of a third party. Besides, the introduction of smart contracts to the blockchain has added programmability to the blockchain and revolutionized the software ecosystem leading toward decentralized applications (DApps) attracting businesses and organizations to employ this technology. Although promising, blockchains and smart contracts have no a…
With blockchain technology, information is recorded in a permanent distributed ledger that is maintained by multiple computers in a peer-to-peer network. There is no central authority that can alter records or change network consensus rules. Such technology could be utilized for voting, title transfers, issuance of company shares, document notarization, but currently, the most popular use-case are virtual currencies. An interesting feature that some virtual currencies have is a multisignature (multisig) protocol that requires the electronic signatures from more than one private key to initiate…
Blockchain Technology is an emerging technology with the potential to disrupt a number of application domains. Though blockchain platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen immense success and acceptability, their nature of being public and anonymous make them unsuitable for many enterprise level use-cases. To address this issue, Linux Foundation has started an open source umbrella initiative, known as the Hyperledger Platforms. Under this initiative, a number of private blockchain platforms have been developed which can be used for different enterprise level applications. However, the scala…
Why No Consensus on Consensus? A Deep Dive into Blockchain Consensus Protocols
VAISR Research Group, Tehran, Iran（德黑兰 VAISR 研究组）；IDEAS Group, DistriNet, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium（鲁汶大学 IDEAS 小组）；Department of Computer Science University of Galway Galway, Ireland（高威大学计算机系）
Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system, is considered to be both alluring and critical for ensuring enhanced security and (in some implementations, non-traceable) privacy for diverse applications in many other domains including in the Internet of Things (IoT) eco-system. Intensive research is currently being conducted in both academia and industry applying the Blockchain technology in multifarious applications. Proof-of-Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is cons…
Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions using Machine Learning Classifiers and Explainability Analysis
Premier University（总理大学）；United International University（联合国际大学）；Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre（网络安全合作研究中心）；Edith Cowan University（埃迪斯科文大学）
Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Second-Order Federated Edge Learning in Personalized Healthcare
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing Lab, Fudan University, China（上海智能信息处理实验室，复旦大学，中国）；Turku Intelligent Embedded and Robotic Systems (TIERS) Lab, University of Turku, Finland（图尔库智能嵌入式与机器人系统（TIERS）实验室，图尔库大学，芬兰）；TIERS Lab, University of Turku, Finland（TIERS实验室，图尔库大学，芬兰）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Islamic University of Madinah, Saudi Arabia（电气工程系，麦加伊斯兰大学，沙特阿拉伯）；School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（信息科学与技术学院，复旦大学，上海，中国）；Faculty of Technology, University of Turku, Finland（技术学院，图尔库大学，芬兰）
