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Platform-Independent Secure Blockchain-Based Voting System

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Information Security (ISC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11060))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Self-tallying means that after the casting phase, voters can count the ballots themselves.

  2. 2.

    The authors call the storage of the ballot as the ballot box.

  3. 3.

    To avoid requiring the administrator to upload the encryption of zero pool, coin flipping protocol can be applied to generate the consistent encryption of zero on all the validation nodes and this is our future work.

  4. 4.

    Bob can choose none of the actual candidates by casting his ballot to a dummy candidate. When the smart contract publishes the voting result, it ignores all the ballots that the dummy candidate gets.

  5. 5.

    The number of nodes to be compromised depends on the underlying consensus protocol.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Bin Yu, Joseph K. Liu, Amin Sakzad & Ron Steinfeld

  2. CSIRO, Sydney, Australia

    Surya Nepal & Paul Rimba

  3. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Man Ho Au

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  1. Bin Yu
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  2. Joseph K. Liu
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  7. Man Ho Au
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Correspondence to Joseph K. Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Liqun Chen

  2. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Mark Manulis

  3. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Steve Schneider

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Yu, B. et al. (2018). Platform-Independent Secure Blockchain-Based Voting System. In: Chen, L., Manulis, M., Schneider, S. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11060. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99136-8_20

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