2018 International Conference on Computing, Power and Communication Technologies (GUCON)

Galgotias University, Greater Noida, UP, India. Sep 28-29, 2018

SecEVS : Secure Electronic Voting System Using

Blockchain Technology
Ashish Singh Kakali Chatterjee
Computer Science & Engineering Computer Science & Engineering
National Institute of Technology Patna National Institute of Technology Patna
Patna-800005, Bihar, (India) Patna-800005, Bihar, (India)
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

Abstract—In todays digital environment, the voting system become system more vulnerable. The Estonia is the first
move from paper based to a digital system. A digital e-voting country in the world to support the electronic voting system
system have many properties such as transparency, decentraliza- [12, 13]. In 2005 and 2007, the country used online voting and
tion, irreversibility, and non-repudiation. The growth in digital
e-voting system arises many security and transparency issues. the primary criteria of the of the voting system is the secrecy
In this paper, we used the blockchain technology in digital e- of the whole system. But, in Estonian I-voting system faces
voting system to solve the security issues and fulfill the system the transparency issue during the election time [14]. These
requirements. It offers new opportunities to deploy a secure voting systems are centralized. Thus, the DDOS attacks are
e-voting system in any organization or country. The solution easily possible on the system. Some attacker and agencies
is far better as compared to other solution because, it is a
decentralized system, contain the results in the form of bit-coins, are accessing the wide range of voter confidential data and
having different locations. We will also analyze the security of computing power to analyze the voting results. Norwegian
our proposed voting system, which shows our protocol is more also implemented the electronic voting system similar to the
secure as compared to other solutions. Estonia voting system [15]. But, by using the cyber attack
any attacker gets the information about the voting system and
Keywords—E-voting system, Block-chain, Hashing, Merkle
hash made the confidential information publicly available. The Scytl
[16] design a new voting system which is different from the
previous two Estonia and Norwegian electronic voting system.
I. I NTRODUCTION
This system is implemented in 2015 in new south wales for
Recent days, electronic voting system is an interested re- the voting. In this process, the voter need to first register in
search topic. Voters can give their vote from remote location the voting system. After the successful registration, the voters
with the help of some smart devices like smart-phones, tablet login into the system. After the login the voter check and
etc. to find out the best suitable candidate in an organization, ensure that the vote is completely entered into the voting
country, or university. The movement from paper based voting database without alteration. Wolchok et al. [17] developed a
system to electronic system brings new enhancement such new pilot electronic voting system by using the mail service.
as real time counting, instant result, environment friendly, In this concept, the voter gives own vote by using the mail.
transparent, anonymity, less error and decentralized. With the The main specialty of this project is, it is a dummy project
development in the digital voting system, there are a number to test the security and robustness of the system. But, due to
of security issues, flaws, and attacks are coming [1]. In many critical security issues, the system is failed and never
any electronic voting system the authentication, anonymity, used for any official voting purpose [17].
accuracy, consistency, and verifiability are the basic system From the above literature work, we have found many security
requirements [2]. It was first introduced by david shaum. This issues, which are very common in the electronic voting system.
system used public key cryptography and blind signature to Thus, to fulfill the security requirements, we have design
maintain the privacy and anonymity between the voters and more secure and robust electronic voting system for university
ballots. election, which fulfill the following criteria:
In the previous years, several research has been done regar-
ding the electronic voting system by using the blockchain • We have designed an electronic voting system in the
technology [3–10]. In 2015, Zhao and Chan [8] proposed university campus to find the best suitable candidate by
a reward and penalty based e-voting system in which a using the concept of blockchain technology.
good user get the rewards and bad behavior user get the • This model not only conduct the voting procedure without
penalty. But, this scheme has some limitations. To remove human intervention, but also provide the security against
such limitations the author [11] proposed e-voting protocols all the major attacks.
using Trusted Third Party (TTP) to make system more easily • The proposed electronic voting system is validated by the
implemented and controlled. But, the low security in TTP system security analysis.

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 The whole block is secured with the cryptographic algorithm,
encryption technique and hash algorithm. The first block is
the foundation of the chain. The block header is used for the
identification of the block contain the hash by using Secure
Hash Algorithm (SHA-256). The SHA-256 hash algorithm
will take any size of plaintext as an input and produce a hashed
output which is 256-byte binary value. Each block header
contain the hash information of the previous block, merkle
root hash, and signature. The block data contain the encrypted
voter data [19]. The complete structure of the blockchain is
Fig. 1: Blockchain structure [5] shown in Figure 1.
C. Merkle root hash
The initial block of the blockchain is known as the “block
0”. It doesn’t contain any hash information about the previous
block. When “block 0” is initialized the creation of “block 1”
is started. After completion of the “block 1”, it is attached
with the “block 0”. This process is continue until a single
hash remains. This single hash is known as the merkle hash.
The generation of merkle root hash in our proposed system is
shown in Figure 2.
III. P ROPOSED ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM
Fig. 2: Merkle root hash A. Network model
The proposed network model is consider for an electronic
voting system of a university campus. In the university, there
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the Section II are four zones: East, west, north, and south zone. Each zone
describes the background of the work. The detail discussion contains number of colleges. The complete network model is
of the proposed electronic voting system is describe in the shown in Figure 3. Now, the university administrator wants
Section III. In Section IV, we have discussed security analysis to elect one student leader from the contestants. Each college
of the system. Finally, the paper is closed with the conclusion starts the voting process. Each vote under one college creates
in Section V. one block and each block join together to make a blockchain.
II. BACKGROUND After completion of the voting, blockchain of each college
under one zone join together to make a zone level blockchain.
In this section, we have discussed the background of the Now, each zone level blockchain join together to make a uni-
blockchain technology and other related terms, which is help versity level blockchain. Now, we get the complete blockchain.
to us to design a more secure and robust electronic voting The committee will consider this single blockchain for vote
system. count.
A. Participants B. Framework of digital voting system
• Voters: It contain set of all eligible voters defined by The proposed electronic voting system uses the blockchain
V={v1 , v2 , v3 .....vn }, where n is the total numbers of technology, which is explain in the Algorithm 1. This system
eligible voters. is made based on the two concepts: hashing and encryption.
• Organizers: It contain set of all Election Organizer The proposed structure of the blockchain is shown in Figure
(EO)=1, which is responsible for managing and verifying 4. The system contain the following components: partici-
the voter identity during the election. pants={Voters}, organizers={Colleges under the university},
• Inspectors: It is responsible for inspect the organizer inspectors={university election commission}, encryption algo-
behavior and limit the power of the organizer. rithm={AES,DES}, Hash algorithm={SHA-256}, voting ser-
ver. All the components of the proposed system is shown in
B. Blockchain Figure 5. The following steps are involved when a voter wants
It was first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto [18]. It to give her/his vote during the election time.
was implemented on peer to peer payment system, where Pre-voting steps:
no need of a centralized authority. The first application of 1) The voters need to register with the voting system. In
the blockchain is the Bitcoin, which is used as a currency the first step, the voter choose a password for login and
in the Internet world. It is an ordered data structure, which a private key for signing.
contains set of transaction in the form of block. Each block is 2) After the successful registration with the system, the
linked with the previous block to maintain the chain structure. voter receive a voter ID.

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 University

East Zone West Zone North Zone South Zone

College 1 College 2 College 3 College 1 College 2 College 3 College 1 College 2 College 3 College 4 College 1 College 2

Fig. 3: University network model for electronic voting system

Algorithm 1 Electronic Voting System

1: procedure I NPUT:(voter User Id, voter Password)
2: OUTPUT: Complete vote in the form of blockchain
3: BEGIN
4: The voter registered with the voting system.
5: Get the voter ID, choose the password and private key.
6: if (voter Id == registered voter Id) and (voter is eligible) then
7: Enter your password.
8: else
9: voter is not registered or he is not eligible.
10: if (Password is correct) then
11: Open the candidate choosing page and choose the candidate.
12: else
13: Enter the correct password.
14: Encryption of voting data- EN CRY P TpubkeyU EC (vote)
15: Signing the encrypted data - SIGNV prikey (EpubkeyU EC (vote))
16: Generation of the block
n BLOCK(block n header+encrypted
k blockdata).
n k v
17: Total no. of votes - i=1 zonei = i=1 j=1 CLij = i=1 j=1 p=1 BLOCKijp , where n is the total number
of zone, k is the total number of college in a particular zone, v is the total number of blocks in a particular college.
18: END

voter server through the Internet. This is the first block

of the blockchain.
7) For generation of the block data, steps 3 to 6 repeated
continuously until election time is over.
Post-voting steps:
1) After the election is over at the college level, blockchain
of each college are joint together for preparation of the
zone level blockchain.
2) The zone level blockchain comes together for prepara-
tion of the university level blockchain.
Fig. 4: Proposed Blockchain structure 3) Now, the election committee check all the votes from the
blockchain and declare the final result of the election.
Voting steps: IV. S YSTEM SECURITY ANALYSIS
1) During the election time, the voter first need to login In this section, we have analyzed our proposed electronic
into the system with the help of voter ID and password. voting system in term of security, privacy, and attacks. The
2) After the successful login, the voter is verified by the proposed system is implemented on Netbean (Integrated Deve-
college election organizers by using the eligible voter lopment Environment) using Java programming language. The
list (voter database). following aspects we have are considered during the designing
3) If the voter is eligible for giving the vote, then the 2nd of the framework.
page opens, which carry the details of contestants. Now,
the voter will give her/his vote. A. Privacy of the data transmission
4) The vote are encrypted by using the public key of According to the proposed e-voting system, the university
University Election Commission (UEC). level blockchain will be stored into the voting server. During
5) The encrypted vote are signed by the voter private key. the data transmission all the related information is stored in
6) Now, the generated voter information is stored into the the block and this block is secure against different attacks and

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 Fig. 5: Framework of proposed electronic voting system

threats. Somehow, if any user gets the blocks, the attacker is V. C ONCLUSION
not able to get any meaningful information because all the
We have mitigated all the possible threats and attacks into
data will present in hashed and encrypted form.
the electronic voting system. The proposed work is based on
B. Voter confidentiality the blockchain technology, which remove all the threats from
the communication link. It is a decentralized system, contain
To provide the confidentiality of the voter identity, we have
hashing and encryption concept for providing the security.
used the SHA-256 hash algorithm and encryption algorithm.
Our proposed system ensures that only registered and eligible
The information related with the votes is kept in encrypted
voter is able to give own votes. Once any voters completed
form. So, that if the block is tempered then also the attacker
her/his vote, the block will be created, which will be publicly
will not be able to know the vote. Thus, this protocol maintains
verifiable and spread over the network. After completion of the
the voter confidentiality.
blockchain no one will do any modification into the block.
C. Duplication and forgery into the system If an attacker wants to do any modification into the block,
the hash value of the block will change and the effect of the
We have created a blockchain to overcome the forgery and modification will reflect into the whole blockchain. The voter
duplication cases during the voting. To ensure that no one has facility to register only once into the system. The voter
will able to give two votes, we have used unique voter ID for ID is used for unique verification and checking the eligibility
unique identification. The blockchain contains the hash of the of the user. Thus, our model ensures that one voter gives only
previous block, signature and merkle root hash. The signature one vote, no one will allow to give two votes. The system
is used to prove the authenticity and integrity of the transaction security analysis shows that the system is more robust and
data. The hash of the previous block is used to maintain the secure against existing attacks.
data integrity in the blockchain. The merkle root hash tells the
root (origin) of the voter data. Thus, our proposed e-voting ACKNOWLEDGMENT
system resist the duplication and forgery issue.
The author would like to acknowledge the Ministry of
D. System level threats and attacks Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government
As discussed before, the proposed e-voting system is based of India for supporting the financial assistant during research
on the encryption and hashing. If an attacker performs any type work through “Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics &
of attacks into the system, the system will identify and block IT”.
them. For instance, any attacker performs the data modification
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