Paper 2018/657

Platform-independent Secure Blockchain-Based Voting System

Bin Yu, Joseph Liu, Amin Sakzad, Surya Nepal, Paul Rimba, Ron Steinfeld, and Man Ho Au

Abstract

Cryptographic techniques are employed to ensure the security of voting systems in order to increase its wide adoption. However, in such electronic voting systems, the public bulletin board that is hosted by the third party for publishing and auditing the voting results should be trusted by all participants. Recently a number of blockchain-based solutions have been proposed to address this issue. However, these systems are impractical to use due to the limitations on the voter and candidate numbers supported, and their security framework, which highly depends on the underlying blockchain protocol and suffers from potential attacks (e.g., force-abstention attacks). To deal with two aforementioned issues, we propose a practical platform-independent secure and verifiable voting system that can be deployed on any blockchain that supports an execution of a smart contract. Verifiability is inherently provided by the underlying blockchain platform, whereas cryptographic techniques like Paillier encryption, proof-of-knowledge, and linkable ring signature are employed to provide a framework for system security and user-privacy that are independent from the security and privacy features of the blockchain platform. We analyse the correctness and coercion-resistance of our proposed voting system. We employ Hyperledger Fabric to deploy our voting system and analyse the performance of our deployed scheme numerically.

Note: add "and" between the authors.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. 21st Information Security Conference
Keywords
blockchainvotingring signature
Contact author(s)
bin yu @ monash edu
History
2018-07-07: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/657
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/657,
      author = {Bin Yu and Joseph Liu and Amin Sakzad and Surya Nepal and Paul Rimba and Ron Steinfeld and Man Ho Au},
      title = {Platform-independent Secure Blockchain-Based Voting System},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/657},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/657}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/657}
}
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