Security Requirement Analysis of Blockchain-Based E-Voting Systems

Blockchain technology provides a stable spot in electronic voting systems by providing a transparent platform for an election which prevents the failures faced by the traditional electronic voting systems and makes it a more accurate and secure platform for voting. However, little attention has been paid to the possible impacts of new technological disruptions on politics and the electoral systems. The main goal of this paper is to design a framework for electronic voting systems using Blockchain technology. To achieve this goal, the paper outlines these three objectives: (1) to explore and identify the challenges in existing voting systems, (2) to identify the methods that could enhance the security and privacy of the electoral voting systems using Blockchain technology, and (3) to design a framework for electronic voting systems that use Blockchain technology in order to address the flaws in current voting systems. A mixed approach is applied in this study to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Blockchain voting system, and design the framework accordingly.

In today’s digital environment, the voting system has moved from paper based to a digital system. A digital e-voting system has many properties such as transparency, decentralization, irreversibility, and non-repudiation. The growth in the digital e-voting system raises many security and transparency issues. In this paper, we used the blockchain technology in the digital electronic voting system to solve the security issues and ful?ll the system requirements. It offers new opportunities to deploy a secure e-voting system in any organization or country. The solution is far better as compared to other solutions because it is a decentralized system, containing the results in the form of bit-coins, having different locations. We will also analyze the security of our proposed voting system, which shows our protocol is more secure as compared to other solutions. The paper proposes a novel electronic voting system based on block chain that addresses some of the limitations in existing systems and evaluates some of the popular blockchain frameworks for the purpose of constructing a blockchain based e-voting system. In particular, we evaluate the potential of distributed ledger technologies through the description of a case study namely, the process of an election, and the implementation of a blockchain based application, which improves the security and decreases the cost of hosting a nation wide election.

Traditionally, electronic voting has relied on a centralized method of administration. The database and the system are both under the jurisdiction of the system's central administration, which oversees the voting process. As a result, issues like database manipulation and duplicate voting may arise, whether accidentally or purposefully. Permissionless blockchain technology has helped overcome many of these issues; however, since the basic consensus technique of such blockchains demands particular computer resources for each voting operation, they are not ideal for new voting systems. Power consumption, efficiency, and system latency all suffer as a result. These issues may be alleviated in part if electronic voting technologies are used. By using corporate blockchain technology, this research presents an electronic voting system that is very reliable and secures the secret vote. It also discusses some of the frequent security and dependability challenges of electronic voting system solutions, such as a flexible network setup.

Comparative Study of Blockchain Techniques in Electronic Voting System

Conventional electronic voting systems use a centralized scheme. A central administration of these systems manages the entire voting process and has partial or total control over the database and the system itself. This creates some problems, accidental or intentional, such as possible manipulation of the database and double voting. Many of these problems have been solved thanks to permissionless blockchain technologies in new voting systems; however, the classic consensus method of such blockchains requires specific computing power during each voting operation. This has a significant impact on power consumption, compromises the efficiency and increases the system latency. However, using a permissioned blockchain improves efficiency and reduces system energy consumption, mainly due to the elimination of the typical consensus protocols used by public blockchains. The use of smart contracts provides a secure mechanism to guarantee the accuracy of the voting result and make the counting procedure public and protected against fraudulent actions, and contributes to preserving the anonymity of the votes. Its adoption in electronic voting systems can help mitigate part of these problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a system that ensures high reliability by applying enterprise blockchain technology to electronic voting, securing the secret ballot. In addition, a flexible network configuration is presented, discussing how the solution addresses some of the security and reliability issues commonly faced by electronic voting system solutions.

Enhancing electronic voting systems to ensure election security and integrity while maintaining cost-efficiency has been a focus of research for decades. Consequently, numerous technological advancements have been integrated into modern voting systems. However, the adoption of technology has introduced new challenges. These include the risk of inaccurate election results due to technical malfunctions, vulnerabilities to election security breaches, and the potential for tampering with results. Additionally, concerns persist about the ability to perform reliable post-election audits to verify and instill confidence in election outcomes. This research explores the application of blockchain technology and zero-knowledge protocols to enhance the security, integrity, and transparency of electronic voting systems. A novel voting algorithm is proposed, designed to complement existing systems by providing verifiable evidence of election accuracy. A prototype implementation is developed, demonstrating the system’s security and audit capabilities. The Rhode Island voting system serves as a case study for this investigation. The proposed algorithm is compatible with current election technologies and addresses key issues associated with current voting systems.

In a democratic regime, voting is crucial to making collective decisions. Unfortunately, although this activity has great significance and value, little effort has been made to improve the way we vote. Paper ballots are still the most used method, although this method is relatively simple, brings many inconveniences, and represents a contradiction to the modern world and its advances. This paper mostly focuses on a review study of blockchain-based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on blockchain, with the help of cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The novelty of this paper is that we tackle the limitations of electronic voting systems found in the literature, including cost, identity management, and scalability problems. Our purpose is to provide key elements for organizations on how to design their proper electronic voting system based on blockchain technology.

This paper presents an application for a voting system that uses blockchain technology. As is known, blockchain technology has a wide range of applications. What makes it suitable for a voting system is that it can prevent fraud. Another advantage of using blockchain technology for a voting system is that it offers unlimited system availability: the system’s operation is not affected by certain factors, such as power outages, updates or network connection.

The modern electronic voting system is an interconnected set of rules, methods, processes, tools and technologies, as well as legal norms that ensure and regulate the remote legitimate will of authorized users (voters). This article proposes, investigates, and verifies by physical prototyping the two-tier architecture of the electronic blockchain voting system. The lower (first) level enables all components of the electronic identification process to be fulfilled by existing systems such as BankID, MobileID, electronic signature, and the like. This will ensure interoperability of electronic voting, inheritance of already implemented national information systems, in particular, of the national system of electronic confidential services, reproducibility of the results of physical prototyping of blockchain voting. The upper (second) level is intended for the implementation of the expression of votes and the counting of votes, with the provision of independent control over the correctness of the compilation of voter lists; the possibility of anonymous voting only by those who are entitled to it; the invariability and irrevocability of the results of the will; ease and transparency of checking the correctness of the vote count and the like. The obtained results of physical prototyping make it possible to confirm the validity and weight of the developed architecture, its ability to meet the basic requirements of decentralized electronic voting, the requirements of information and functional security and reliability of information technologies. The practical implementation of the developed blockchain voting architecture will increase trust in information resources and services (which is especially relevant for government agencies) and will reduce time and overhead; will make impossible the intervention of centralized institutions and possible corruption; will increase the reliability of information storage and the quality of services provided.

Developing an electronic voting system that meets the practical needs of administrators has been a difficult task for a long time. Now, blockchain technologies solve this problem by providing a distributed ledger with immutable, encrypted, and secure transactions. Distributed ledger technologies are an interesting technological leap in the field of data innovation, transparency, and trustability. In public blockchain, distributed ledger technology is widely used. The blockchain technology can be used in an almost infinite number of ways to benefit from sharing economies. The purpose of this study is to assess how blockchain may be utilized to build electronic voting systems that can be used as a service. The purpose of electronic voting systems is explained in this article, as are the technological and legal limitations of employing blockchain as a service. Then, using blockchain as a foundation, we propose a new electronic voting system that fixes the flaws we observed. In general, this paper evaluates the capabilities of distributed ledger technologies by depicting a contextual investigation in order to fine-tune the process of political election decisions and employing a blockchain-based application that improves security and lowers the cost of conducting nationwide elections.

Secret voting in democratic countries using computational intelligence and Blockchain Technology, the vote is a fundamental right in democracy to elect people’s representatives at various levels. Manual voting is tedious and error prone. E-voting systems replaced the manual voting systems to overcome illegal voting and malpractices. Due to growing cybercrimes, the existing e-voting systems are not ideal and face many challenges like authentication, privacy, data integrity, etc. This paper presents computational intelligence and Blockchain technology in developing secret e-voting systems. This paper addresses various issues not addressed by traditional and e-voting systems and proposes new voting using computational intelligence techniques and blockchain technology.

Many have long aimed to create a safe electronic voting system that maintains the confidentiality and integrity of traditional voting methods while using the convenience and openness of modern technology. Ballot paper or electronic voting machines are the current voting schemes in every nation, and democratic voting is a significant event in every country. Problems with these procedures abound, including lack of openness, poor voter turnout, vote manipulation, mistrust of the election body, forgery of unique identification (voter ID card), delays in disseminating results, and, most importantly, security breaches. Prioritizing the security of digital voting is of utmost importance when contemplating implementing a digital voting system. The article assesses the objective of building a blockchain-based e-voting system [BC-E-VOT] that uses digital voting technology. Electronic voting methods that leverage the distributed ledger attract much attention because they can make digital voting more transparent, secure, and honest. As shown in this research, a successful strategy for electronic voting may be achieved by using Blockchain's cryptographic underpinnings and transparency. Due to its complete transparency, the suggested approach satisfies the essential criteria for electronic voting systems. Since Blockchain employs a decentralized mechanism for data storage rather than storing all of the data in one central place, it becomes challenging to tamper with the data when utilizing this technology to build a decentralized application. By creating a decentralized system using the WSN platform, a third party is no longer needed to oversee the election's access control. This article provides a system for electronic voting that guarantees privacy, trustworthiness, and security. The suggested approach is practical and secure, according to the findings.

The present paper considers national electronic voting system problems in Ukraine, principles of construction and development prospects. Electronic voting refers to a way to exercise will, in which the voting, counting, and publication of the results processes are carried out by electronic means and systems. Most existing voting systems are built on centralized principles and this allows providing certain advantages, for example, high controllability of the system, its reliability, and autonomy. However, hierarchical systems also have significant drawbacks, in particular, single decision center and centralized storage leads to vulnerability to cyberattacks on them. Also it should be noted, that in centralized systems due to the abuse of administrative resources distortions of the results of expression of will are possible. This is the biggest threat to the modern democratic information society. Research, development, and implementation of new technologies of electronic voting, which would make it impossible to intervene and distort the results of the will through decentralization while maintaining all the system qualities for safety and reliability are promising. This article proposes particular proposals for architecture substantiating as well as a basic model and interaction protocols of a decentralized electronic blockchain voting system. A two-level blockchain voting architecture is proposed, researched and verified through physical prototyping. Its implementation will increase confidence in information resources and services (which is especially important for government agencies) will reduce time and overhead costs; make it impossible for centralized institutions to intervene and possible corrupt practices; will increase the reliability of information storage and the quality of services provided.

While the different electronic voting systems are proposed and discussed in the first part of the foundation, this chapter presents an overview and analysis of existing approaches for the evaluation of electronic voting systems. It is discussion is necessary to know these approaches and their vulnerabilities in order to provide an exhaustive list of requirements and an evaluation approach.The surveyed approaches include requirement catalogues, ordinance, laws, and research activities. The discussed list of requirements were developed by people from different disciplines, like a group of security experts, data protection officers, security auditing enterprises, lawyers, or security auditing civil services.The first part of this chapter concentrates on requirement catalogues for electronic voting machines (in particular, the German and American election regulations) while the second part discusses those for remote electronic voting systems (in particular, the Council of Europe recommendations, the catalogue for “Online-Voting Systems for Non-parliamentary Elections”, the catalogue of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, the Swiss and Austrian election law, as well as the Network Voting System Standards). Afterwards, scientific papers are analysed, in particular Shamos’ commandments, Mercuri’s PhD thesis, a technical report from the EU CyberVote project, and McGaley’s PhD thesis. In all three cases, the analysis is structured according to context / background in which the requirements have been developed, input sources used, type of electronic voting system addressed , categories in which the requirements are classified / level of detail for the requirements, proposed evaluation and certification techniques (including underlying trust model), and people identified to oversee the evaluation and certification. The vulnerabilities are summarised in the conclusion.KeywordsTrust ModelSecurity RequirementVote SystemNational Metrology InstituteSecurity ExpertThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Electronic voting systems verifiable end-to-end allow voters verify if their votes are cast as intended, collected as listed and counted as collected, that is, provide a calculation can be conferred by civil society. Essentially, the end-to-end electronic voting systems provide assurance to voters that each stage of the election worked properly. At the same time, electronic voting systems should protect the privacy of the voter and to avoid the possibility of influence and undue electoral coercion of voters. Several voting systems have been proposed, varying in usability and practicality. In this study, we analyzed various processes of electronic voting and counting of votes, aiming at a better understanding in the pursuit of secrecy of the vote.