Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC 2019)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19K25-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7808-4

Block Chain Based Cloud Computing Model on

EVM Transactions for Secure Voting
Sathya V*, Arpan Sarkar1, Aritra Paul2, Sanchay Mishra3
*
Assistant Professor, M E
*123
Dept. of Computer Science
123
SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Ramapuram, Chennai, Tamil Nadu – IN 600089
Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract--- Voting is a tedious task in this nation. The I. INTRODUCTION
highest amount of controversies and corruptions are
involved along this path. A nation needs a fair and Voting in this country is the most tedious job to be
unbiased election for the masses to redeem their right to handled, involving all kinds of corrupted and illegal
elect the leader of their choice. The latest trends of EVM deeds. Elections in India are conducted exclusively using
(Electronic Voting Machine) hacking has taken over the EVM’s developed over the past two decades by a group
ability to hold a clear and transparent election. In this of government-owned companies. These devices, known
paper, we discuss an innovative approach by imbibing the in India as EVMs, have been adopted greatly for their
latest technologies with the traditional voting methods. simple design, ease of conduct, and robustness. However,
The technology involves a secure data storage technique recently they have also been marked prey following
named as block chain which is used for cryptocurrencies widespread reports of election irregularities. Despite this
and is proven [7] for its security. The votes which are criticism, many details of the mechanism have never been
recorded by the EVM will be updated with the cloud- publicly discussed, and they have not been subjected to a
based storage (SAAS). Any changes made to the voting stringent, independent security evaluation. We conclude
panel or tampering with the votes will cause the hash to that in spite of the machines’ simplicity and [8] software
break the link and by detecting the manipulated votes, trusted computing base, they are vulnerable to indigenous
any discrepancy can be removed by marking them as attacks that can modify election results and violate the
NOTA, hence not affecting the polling by any means. law of the election commission. Most of the attacks done
Blockchain technology has a significant feature of Proof- are physical, by changing the electricals, but if the
of-Work which does not allow the continuous creation of machine is connected real time to a cloud server and
data blocks hence protecting the rapid manipulation of involves an independent screen which shows the
data. Also, this system only requires uploading the hashes confirmation of choice symbolically before placing the
created along with the blocks which are stored in a hash final vote, it can help in detecting problems and maintain
table [12] on the cloud. The data of the EVM, when the integrity of the system. Blockchain technology [3] has
tallied with the hash table, can help in identifying the primarily been used to store data and the major advantage
point of manipulation. Moreover, the areas with no of this technology is the inertia of the data. This
broadband internet connection can also implement these technology was initially implemented by Satoshi
techniques as it required only a few kilobytes of upload Nakamoto [1] in 2008 to imbibe the concept of
data rate to update the hash values. The already existing cryptocurrency (or) bitcoins as a medium of secure
UIDAI based biometric system already adds an extra electronic exchange of money. According to this
layer of security to the voting system. Each vote will be technology the data once stored, a hash is generated, the
treated as a single block of data. Also, as added features following block stores this hash so as to form a chain of
of block chain technology, the P2P (Peer to Peer) links between the data blocks. The hash generated is
network allows only communication between two already calculated from the data and any change in data causes
connected peers. Man-in-Middle attacks are impossible in the hash to change. The Proof-of-Work technology which
this case as the blockchain proof-of-work does not allow is a part of the Blockchain technology, helps in
mass updating of data at a time, hence reducing the rate at preventing the modification of data by limiting the
which votes can be manipulated, hence securing a hashing rate. Hence, only a certain limited number of
country’s political future. blocks can be created or modified at a time, hence
lowering the chances of corruption. Moreover, the
Keywords--- Blockchain Technology, Cloud computing, hashing in this case requires to be done at every peer
EVM, UIDAI, SAAS, Proof-of-Work, Election, Voting node individually to be accepted by all the peers else it is
Machine. rejected.
978-1-5386-7808-4/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1075
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19K25-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7808-4

II. RELATED WORKS

1. Satoshi Nakamoto explained how

Blockchains [1], could be used for secure
transfer of data in between transactions for a
new method for currency transfer but it is not
good enough for other applications.
2. Yuan Yuan and his team [2] explained how
Blockchain can help in an online voting
system but doesn’t explain implementation. Fig. 1 Block Chain Schema
3. Arya Sahadevan and team [6] mentioned an
IOT based approach for real time tackling of
corruption at polling booths.
4. Yiderendra Kumar Yadav et. Al [11]
mentioned an integrated and secure way to
use biometrics to pulverise booths and
affirming the voter but grieves potential.
5. Hui Yang [5] and team showed a way for
future improvements in the 5G network
wind. The fibre optics-based connection
would help in zero latency upload and
download of data for immediate action.

Algorithm Secure_Vote
III. TECHNIQUES AND ALGORITHMS
Input: Ballot_info
Output: Hash
The given system uses a secure data storage system
called as block chain technology. It involves storing data While true
into blocks and securing them with a hash. Our proposed Loop
system involved storing the ballot information as a block Hash=Hash (Ballot)
for each and every voter and transfer the hash over If (Hash= =NULL)
internet to cloud based storages, which when tallied with Then
the EVM can discretely identify the manipulated votes. Break
A. Voting Algorithm (Proposed) Else
Create_block(hash)
Step 1: Collect the ballot information from the EVM and End if
send it to Blockchain generator. End loop
Step 2: Blockchain generator generates the blocks with B. Code Snippet (Python 3.x)
data and hashes as well as connects to the previous hash.
Step 3: Hash value is sent to the cloud service for remote
transfer using low bandwidth internet.
Step 4: The receiver station receives the data as Publish-
Subscribe model and stores it in a hash table.
Step 5: The hash of the blocks is compared with the hash
table, if any discrepancies are found, it is rejected and
marked as NOTA.

978-1-5386-7808-4/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1076

 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19K25-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7808-4

Initially developed for cryptocurrency, but soon

The above diagram [Fig.1] shows how the ballot import uuid
import hashlib
information can be encrypted and stored in a hash table
on the cloud, which is updated after every entry. Any def hash_password (password):
changes made to the information on the EVM changes # uuid is used to generate a random number
the hashes, hence discreetly identifying the faulty blocks. salt = uuid.uuid4().hex
return hashlib.sha256 (salt.encode() +
password.encode()).hexdigest() + ':' + salt
Error Detection Rates # random number is concatenated for added security
5 def check_password (hashed_password,
4 user_password):
3
2
password, salt = hashed_password.split(':')
return password == hashlib.sha256(salt.encode() +
1
user_password.encode()).hexdigest()
0
Block 1 Block 2 Block 3 Block 4

Hashed Standard

Fig. 2 Error Production Rates (in ms)

IV. BLOCKCHAIN BASED VOTING

SCHEMA

The innovative voting systems consists of four parts:

1. EVM 4. Receiver Station
2. Block Chain Software
3. Cloud Storage
The polling booth has a direct uplink with the cloud
service and it continuously uploads data to server using a
low bandwidth connection. The data that is sent is the
hash which is 16 bits long. It might be numeric or alpha
numeric depending upon the algorithm used. SHA1, Fig. 3 Blockchain Schema
SHA256, md5 can be used for based comparison.
has gained popularity for its security features.
The receiving end also has a system set up which
consists of the hash table. The data stored on the cloud
server is continuously read by the system and stored on
the table. The hash then is compared on the day of vote
counting, with the ones in the EVM. If they match the
votes are calculated else, they are marked as NOTA such
as to favour no particular political party.
1. EVM:
Also known as the electronic voting machine, 3. Cloud Storage:
stores the vote entered by a voter in a secure latch-
based storage system. Cloud storage service offered by Google
2. Block Chain Software: or Amazon are fast enough to store data at the
required rate.

978-1-5386-7808-4/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1077

 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19K25-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7808-4

4. Receiver Station: the manipulation and mark the vote as NOTA. The
received data can also be classified as private block chain
A general server or a computer which as it involves P2P connections. Any possibilities for man
can fetch data from the cloud and store it in a in the middle attacks are ruled out as the system id for the
data structure like a table or a database. Peer will be the same as the receiving Peer. Any other
Peers need the same system id to receive the blocks and
to decode them. Also, the hashes will not be the same at
different Peers.

Fig. 5 Voting System Implementation

Fig. 4 Tampered Block Example
Also, further down the line, UIDAI based Aadhar
numbers/ VID can also be hashed along with the voter’s
choice to identify each and every vote uniquely. This can
help in further improving redundancy rather than the
current inking systems used.
The cloud can be connected to a database on the
server as it has to store large amounts of data in case of a
national level polling. The proposed python code for
cloud implementation is given below:

import mysql.connector

mydb = mysql.connector.connect
(
host="localhost",
user="yourusername",
passwd="yourpassword",
database="mydatabase"
)

The above diagram [Fig.4] shows the effect of mycursor = mydb.cursor()

tampering with the data on the block. The Purple block is
the initial data which is chained to the red block. Later by mycursor.execute("CREATE TABLE customers
some means the purple block is manipulated, represented (name VARCHAR(255), address
here by green. The hash linked to the block changes as VARCHAR(255))" #this consists the SQL
well as the link from the red block to the green block statement
breaks as it is not the same. At this point we can identify
978-1-5386-7808-4/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 1078
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19K25-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7808-4

V. CONCLUSION [6] Arya Sahadevan, Deepa Mathew, Jairam

Mookatana, and Bijoy A. Jose,”An Offline Online
Strategy for IoT using MQTT”, 2017 IEEE 4th
The current system used for voting has been blindly International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud
trusted to be the best, but has no transparency and hence Computing
easily hackable. This increases the chances of corruption
and immorality which leads to an unstable government [7] Shifa Manaruliesya Anggriane, Surya Michrandi
and unhappy public. Implementing cloud-based solutions Nasution, Fairuz Azmi,”Advanced E-Voting System
as well as blockchain for security will improvise on the Using Paillier Homomorphic Encryption Algorithm”,
transparency for the critics and also improve the security 2016 International Conference on Informatics and
on the ballot information that is collected. Hence, the Computing (ICIC)
paper successfully demonstrates a way to improvise the
[8] Mark A. Will, Brandon Nicholson, Marc Tiehuis
political future in the country especially India.
and Ryan K L Ko,”Secure Voting in the Cloud using
Homomorphic Encryption and Mobile Agents”, 2015
International Conference on Cloud Computing Research
VI. FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS and Innovation

 Better networks can be used for faster storing and [9] Quentin MONNET, Youcef HAMMAL, Lynda
avoiding further network vulnerabilities. MOKDAD, Jalel BEN-OTHMAN,”Fair Election of
 Cryptocurrency security is increasing day by day Monitoring Nodes in WSNs”
and hence improved security qualities will [10] Haijun Pan, Edwin Hou, Senior Member, and
enhance the system. Nirwan Ansari, Fellow,”M-NOTE: A Multi-part Ballot
 EVM(s) can be equipped with a screen to based E-voting System with Clash Attack Protection”,
confirm the vote symbolically. As a large mass of IEEE ICC 2015 - Communication and Information
voters are uneducated, double tap system should Systems Security Symposium
be implemented, where first press requires a
second confirmation after the party is [11] Yirendra Kumar Yadav, Saumya Batham,
symbolically confirmed on the screen. Mradul Jain, Shivani Sharma,”An Approach to Electronic
Voting System using UIDAI”, 2014 International
Conference on Electronics and Communication Systems
(ICECS -2014), Feb. 13 -14, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA
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[12] Friðrik Þ. Hjálmarsson , Gunnlaugur K.
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