Online Voting Scheme Using IBM Cloud-Based Hyperledger Fabric with Privacy-Preservation

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The current traditional paper ballot voting schemes suffer from several limitations such as processing delays due to counting paper ballots, lack of transparency, and manipulation of the ballots. To solve these limitations, an electronic voting (e-voting) scheme has received massive interest from both governments and academia. In e-voting, individuals can cast their vote online using their smartphones without the need to wait in long lines. Additionally, handicapped voters who face limited wheelchair access in many polling centers could now participate in elections hassle-free. The existing e-voting schemes suffer from several limitations as they are either centralized, based on public blockchains, or utilize local private blockchains. This results in privacy issues (using public blockchains) or large financial costs (using local/private blockchains) due to the amount of computing power and technical knowledge needed to host blockchains locally. To address the aforementioned limitations, in this paper, we propose an online voting scheme using IBM cloud-based Hyperledger Fabric. Our scheme allows voters to cast their encrypted votes in a secure manner. Then any participant can obtain the ballot results in a decentralized and transparent manner, without sacrificing the privacy of individual voters. We implement the proposed scheme using IBM cloud-based Hyperledger Fabric. The experimental results identify the performance characteristics of our scheme and demonstrate that it is feasible to run an election consisting of thousands of participants using cloud-based Fabric.