Paper 2022/310
Dispute-free Scalable Open Vote Network using zk-SNARKs
Muhammad ElSheikh and Amr M. Youssef
Abstract
The Open Vote Network is a self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol suitable for boardroom elections. Currently, it has two Ethereum-based implementations: the first, by McCorry et al., has a scalability issue since all the computations are performed on-chain. The second implementation, by Seifelnasr et al., solves this issue partially by assigning a part of the heavy computations to an off-chain untrusted administrator in a verifiable manner. As a side effect, this second implementation became not dispute-free; there is a need for a tally dispute phase where an observer interrupts the protocol when the administrator cheats, i.e., announces a wrong tally result. In this work, we propose a new smart contract design to tackle the problems in the previous implementations by (i) preforming all the heavy computations off-chain hence achieving higher scalability, and (ii) utilizing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) to verify the correctness of the off-chain computations, hence maintaining the dispute-free property. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, we develop prototype implementations on Ethereum and conduct multiple experiments for different implementation options that show a trade-off between the zk-SNARK proof generation time and the smart contract gas cost, including an implementation in which the smart contract consumes a constant amount of gas independent of the number of voters.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 (FC 2022) workshops, WTSC'22
- Keywords
- Open Vote NetworkE-votingBlockchainzk-SNARKSmart contractsEthereum
- Contact author(s)
- m_elshei @ encs concordia ca
- History
- 2022-03-07: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/310
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/310, author = {Muhammad ElSheikh and Amr M. Youssef}, title = {Dispute-free Scalable Open Vote Network using zk-{SNARKs}}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/310}, year = {2022}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/310} }