PVPBC: Privacy and Verifiability Preserving E-Voting Based on Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

Privacy and verifiability are crucial security requirements in e-voting systems and combining them is considered to be a challenge given that they seem to be contradictory. On one hand, privacy means that cast votes cannot be traced to the corresponding voters. On the other hand, linkability of voters and their votes is a requirement of verifiability which has the consequence that a voter is able to check their vote in the election result. These two contradictory features can be addressed by adopting privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, which at the same time as achieving privacy, achieve verifiability. Many end-to-end schemes that support verifiability and privacy have the need for some voter action. This makes ballot casting more complex for voters. We propose the PVPBC voting system, which is an e-voting system that preserves privacy and verifiability without affecting voter usability. The PVPBC voting system uses an effective and distributed method of authorization, which is based on revocable anonymity, by making use of a permissioned distributed ledger and smart contract. In addition, the underlying PVPBC voting system satisfies election verifiability using the Selene voting scheme. The Selene protocol is a verifiable e-voting protocol. It publishes votes in plaintext accompanied by tracking numbers. This enables voters to confirm that their votes have been captured correctly by the system. Numerical experiments support the claim that PVPBC scales well as a function of the number of voters and candidates. In particular, PVPBC’s authorization time increases linearly as a function of the population size. The average latency associated with accessing the system also increases linearly with the voter population size. The latency incurred when a valid authentication transaction is created and sent on the DLT network is 6.275 ms. Empirical results suggest that the cost in GBP for casting and storing an encrypted ballot alongside a tracker commitment is a linear function of the number of candidates, which is an attractive aspect of PVPBC.

E-Voting Inclusivity: The Accessibility of Elderly Voters in the 2021 Village Head Election in Sleman Regency

“…An election can be inclusive if there are indications such as the following: first, the total coverage of voters with the right to vote has been registered in the voter register, and second, the level of voting rights is high. influenced by the level of community political awareness (Sallal et al, 2023).…”

Special Issue on Security and Privacy in Blockchains and the IoT Volume II

“…Notwithstanding, privacy has a high priority with regard to elections as well since it must be ensured that a vote can be cast confidentially and that it cannot be traced back to the voter. Sallal et al [14] address this paradox by leveraging blockchain technologies. In their proposed PVPBC e-voting system, a permissioned distributed ledger and smart contracts are applied, achieving effective authorization while preserving revocable anonymity properties.…”

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

“…While e-voting schemes have the potential to solve issues associated with traditional paper ballot elections, the majority of the current e-voting schemes rely on a central third party to run the election [6][7][8]. This makes them vulnerable to single-point-of-failure attacks as well as privacy concerns of submitted votes by both internal and external attackers [9][10][11]. They are vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks launched by malicious users and external attackers.…”