On Trade-offs of Applying Block Chains for Electronic Voting Bulletin Boards

Sven Heiberg; Ivo Kubjas; Janno Siim; Jan Willemson

Paper 2018/685

On Trade-offs of Applying Block Chains for Electronic Voting Bulletin Boards

Sven Heiberg, Ivo Kubjas, Janno Siim, and Jan Willemson

Abstract

This paper takes a critical look at the recent trend of building electronic voting systems on top of block chain technology. Even though being very appealing from the election integrity perspective, block chains have numerous technical, economical and even political drawbacks that need to be taken into account. Selecting a good trade-off between desirable properties and restrictions imposed by different block chain implementations is a highly non-trivial task. This paper aims at bringing some clarity into performing this task. We will mostly be concentrating on public permissionless block chains and their applications as bulletin board implementations as these are the favourite choices in majority of the recent block chain based voting protocol proposals.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Published elsewhere. E-Vote-ID 2018
Keywords: Block chains electronic voting bulletin boards
Contact author(s): janwil @ cyber ee
History: 2018-07-17: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/685
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/685,
      author = {Sven Heiberg and Ivo Kubjas and Janno Siim and Jan Willemson},
      title = {On Trade-offs of Applying Block Chains for Electronic Voting Bulletin Boards},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/685},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/685}
}