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A Survey of Blockchain Based on E-voting Systems

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DOI: 10.1145/3376044.3376060

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 A Survey of Blockchain Based on E-voting Systems
YOUSIF ABUIDRIS RAJESH KUMAR WANG WENYONG
School of Computer Science and School of Computer Science and School of Computer Science and
Engineering Engineering Engineering
University of Electronic Science and University of Electronic Science and University of Electronic Science and
Technology of China Technology of China Technology of China
Chengdu, china Chengdu, china Chengdu, china
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

ABSTRACT recordss take the shape of transactions; a block is a collection of

Blockchain technology as a decentralized and distributed public these transactions. In these circumstances, we believe that
ledger in a P2P network has recently gained much attention. In Blockchain also falls because this technology self-cryptographic
this technology, a linked block structure is applied, and a trusted validation structure among transactions and can be employed for
consensus mechanism is established to synchronize data authenticating, authorizing, and auditing device produced data.
modifications, making it possible to develop a tamper-proof Moreover, because of the blockchain’s decentralized nature,
digital platform for data storage and sharing. We think that which will lead to the achievement of the transparency principle.
blockchain could be used in various interactive online systems, Also, blockchain eliminates the need for the third party trust and
such as the Internet of Things, supply chain systems, voting has no single point of failure. Furthermore, blockchain is
systems, etc. The scope of this survey is to shed light on some immutable, meaning that any proposed (new block) to the ledger
recent contributions of the security and privacy issues associated must reference the previous version of the ledger, which will lead
with e-voting based on blockchain. At the end of this paper, we to the creation of an immutable chain from which the blockchain
provided a comparison for the security and privacy requirements gets its name and prevents the integrity of the previous entries
of the existing e-voting systems based on blockchain. from being tampered. Therefore, a safe and robust e-voting
system can be developed with the use of blockchain. Fig.1, show
CCS Concepts the e-voting system stages based on blockchain technology. The
• General and reference ➝ Surveys and overviews• Security paper aims to familiarize newly interested scientists. Besides,
and privacy ➝ Security requirements. updating the readers with some prior understanding of Blockchain,
including the latest security and privacy issues in the e-voting
Keywords systems based on blockchain . This study approach will present a
Blockchain; E-voting system; privacy; security survey of the state-of-the-art papers in which the Blockchain is
used to provide the e-voting schemes with some level of privacy
1. INTRODICATION and security.
Electronic voting or E-voting, which uses automated systems to
help to cast and counting the votes in the polling process,
Recently, for the past a few years, it has been the subject of active
research in cryptography. To assure voter anonymity, minimizing
the cost of running polling, while ensuring the polling integrity
and end-to-verification by carrying out the security and privacy
issues with compliance the requirements [1–3] . In the present era,
when considering implementing an electronic voting system, the
security issues of e-voting systems are always the biggest concern.
There can be no suspicion about the ability of the system to secure Figure 1. E-voting system stages based on blockchain
data and defend against potential attacks with such massive technology.
decisions at stake. One way to potentially solve security issues is
through Blockchain technology [4–6]. Blockchain technology 2. OVERVIEWS
comes from the fundamental architecture of the bitcoin
cryptocurrency [7, 8]. It is a distributed database form in which 2.1 E-voting Essential Issues
The major challenge of e-voting is to expand and develop the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for constitutional democracy and reinforce procedures going for the
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are strengthening inhabitants [9].
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights The modern human advancement, achieved by the Information
for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be Society, ought to consent to the standards and estimations of
honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or majority rule government. The presentation of an e-voting
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
framework ought to adjust to this standard, since casting a ballot
specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
[email protected]. is one of the capacities ”e-residents” may wish to see performed
on the web. In this regard, a wonder, which ought to be thought
ICBTA 2019, December 9–11, 2019, Xi'an, China about is the digital divide. Severe many security gaps are
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7743-0/19/12…$15.00
surrounding e-voting that should be dealt with before something
like this can turn into a completely confided in all actuality
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3376044.3376060
anywhere. Any election has certain phases, and each of them literally open the ballot box, locate his vote, and check that it is
carries hazards, and few elections do not include stakeholders both existing and right [10].
with a vested interest in the outcome, irrespective of whether it is
a local election or a large-scale national election with widespread 3.2 Agora
global ramifications, and the motive is to go around the law to It is an organization that proposed a digital voting platform using
achieve their goal. Notwithstanding the kinds of challenges that blockchain. It was founded in 2015 and deployed partially in
have been mentioned before, you can include stuff like spoofing March 2018 during the presidential election of Sierra Leone. In
votes and voters, denial of service attacks, voting phishing sites, this system, votes are recorded to various layers of blockchains
fraud, redirecting or intercepting votes, attacks on data centers, promptly, guaranteeing that the result has not tampered. The
and basic use error. Therefore, It is time for government agencies ballot data is completely auditable by any third party, including
and security experts to come together to proactively create the voters themselves, while keeping up voter privacy [11].
policies and security standards that can be followed and
implemented because we will continue to have a severe security 3.3 Voatz
issue until that occurs. This company established a phone-based voting system for public
elections using blockchain. Electors verify their characters on the
2.2 Benefits of Blockchain-based E-voting application by snapping a photo of themselves and their ID and
1) Security: Blockchain offers a refreshed framework for voters giving distinguishing biometric proof as to either a unique mark
that could fix the issues of security breaches, fraud, and corruption. like the fingerprint or retinal scan [12].
2) Transparency: It is a crucial necessity for a democratic society 3.4 Polyas
with considering the blockchain anonymous and decentralized This company was established in 1996. The company used the
nature; votes can be easily pursued, checked, and associated by a blockchain technology to offers an e-voting system for public and
wide range of sources while keeping up voter privacy. private sectors. Polyas was certified as safe enough for the e-
3) Auditability: When data is stored, it gives a changeless record voting systems by the German Federal Office for Information
that fills in as a steady auditable trail to the populace Security in 2016.To perform e-voting systems, many big
companies across Germany use Polyas. Polyas now has customers
2.3 Challenges Faced Blockchain-Based E- across North American and European nations [13].
Voting Systems 3.5 Luxoft
1) Scalability: Blockchain works well for a few numbers of users. It is a global IT service provider created a blockchain-based
However, when using it for large-scale elections, the number of solution e-Vote for municipal elections in Switzerland. The first
users will increase over the network and lead to a higher cost and time this system was used in June 2038 by city of Zug in
time consuming for the transaction. Switzerland [14].
2) Immatureness: In 2016, the not-for-profit Democracy Earth
organization utilized a blockchain to give Colombian exiles a 3.6 Polys
voice in the peace referendum that was led to endorse the consent It affords a secure mobile online voting based-blockchain.
to end the contention between the Colombian government and Electors get customized codes employing email and use them to
FARC guerillas. According to the organization, the underlying cast a ballot either online or at a public polling station. the details
challenge of using blockchain innovations is still in its early days. can found in a whitepaper [15].
3) Acceptableness: Even though blockchain is excellent at giving 4. LITERATURE SURVEY
security and accuracy, citizen’s confidence and trust are vital Over the past few years, several articles have been released to
elements for Blockchain-based E-voting success. Blockchain’s discuss the security and privacy issues related to e-voting systems
complexity may prevent standard citizens from the worthiness of based on blockchain. Table.1 shows the Comparison of the
Blockchain-based E-voting. security and privacy requirement for the different references.
4) Coercion: Although there are numerous methodologies tended Table.2 Reflect the cons and pros for the protocols which
to the issue of coercion-resistance, but still (vote-buying, and proposed in various references.
voter coercion) is highly scalable in the e-voting environment.
1) The authors in [16], proposed a voting protocol based on
3. THE COMPANIES OF E-VOTING Quantum Blockchain. This protocol provides essential security
requirements such as anonymous, binding, nonreusable, verifiable,
SYSTEMS BASED ON BLOCKCHAIN eligible, fair and self-tallying. Besides this Quantum Blockchain,
The following companies and organizations are enhancing the e- they used other quantum techniques such as:
voting field: some of them are well-established, but most of them
have been created over the past five years. They all have a  Quantum Secure Communication (QSC).
common desire to bring democracy to the power of the blockchain  Quantum Bit commitment (QBC).
network.  Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).
2) The authors in [17], proposed bearable new e-voting protocol
3.1 Follow My Vote that used blockchain as a transparent ballot box. This protocol has
It is an organization proposed a secure online voting platform been intended to:
based-blockchain with the capacity to audit the ballot box and see
the elections progress in real-time. This platform using a webcam  Abide by the underlying of e-voting properties.
and user ID, the voter can remotely and safely sign in and vote in  Allow a degree of decentralization.
favor of his ideal candidate then he can use his identifier to quite  Provide for the elector to modify/update their vote
within the allowable voting phase.
Furthermore, the author reveals some pros and cons of one-time ring signature to guarantee and protect the anonymity of
blockchain-based systems. the voting scheme in the blockchain.
3) The author’s in [18], designed a secure online e-voting protocol 7) The author’s in [22], proposed techniques to employ
based blockchain named Verify-Your- Vote (VYV). This protocol blockchain to enhance the security issues for e-voting as
guarantees the following features: following:
 Eligibility: Just the acceptable elector can vote.  He designed a synchronized model of voting records
 Fairness: No essential results that could affect other based on DLT to avoid fraud in the ballot.
elector’s choices are made available.  He designed a user credential model based on ECC
 Vote privacy: privately keep the votes; this can likewise cryptography to manage the cost of verification and
be demonstrated as an unlinkability between the elector non-repudiation.
and his ballot.  He designed a withdrawal model that enables electors to
 Receipt-freeness: The elector cannot create a certificate replace their votes before a preset deadline.
that enables him to back to the third party to inform he  The verification of the system scheme has been proved
voted for a particular candidate. That is to stop vote- and designed on Linux platforms in the P2P network.
selling. 8) The authors in [23], proposed e-voting system based on the
 Verifiability: Each elector can verify whether his/her Prˆet `a Voter e-voting method. The system designed to support
vote has been counted rightly. special requirements such as privacy, eligibility, convenience,
 Robustness: The protocol can allow a set numberof receipt-freeness, and verifiability. The rest of the author
offending electors. contribution arranged as follow:
4) The authors in [19], proposed likewise an e-voting protocol
based on the blockchain without a trusted third party, which  The system intends to accomplish secure digital voting
affords a safe and adaptable voting technique. The protocol without jeopardizing its usability.
provides Public Verifiability, Individual Verifiability,  The system is designed using a web-based interface to
Dependability, Consistency, Auditability, Anonymity and help users dealing fingerprinting to prevent double
Transparency. voting.
 The security concerns of the votes are based on the
5) The authors in [20], proposed voting protocol preserves end-to- blockchain using cryptographic hashes to secure end-to-
end privacy based-blockchain and maintains detectability and end verification.
correctability against defrauding without a third party committed. 9) The authors in [24] proposed a methodology of combining the
The protocol implementation respecting the hyperledger structure secret sharing scheme and homomorphic encryption with the
proves the validity and practical applicability. blockchain to build up decentralized e-voting framework without
6) The authors in [21] proposed a scheme to secure electronic a trusted third party. Moreover, the framework provides a
voting based on blockchain for the largescale voting using transparent voting manner while preserving the anonymity of the
homomorphic ElGamal encryption, and they used the technique of voter’s identity. The author’s during the billing phase, preserve
the data transmission privacy and verify the ballots.
Table 1. A comparison of the security and privacy for e-voting systems based blockchain in different references.
References
Security Requirements [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]
Eligibility           
Anonymity  ⨯ ⨯        ⨯
Fairness    ⨯       
Auditability ⨯ ⨯     ⨯ ⨯   ⨯
Individual verifiability     ⨯      
Universal verifiability     ⨯      ⨯
Vote-Privacy  ⨯         
Consistency ⨯ ⨯   ⨯   ⨯   ⨯
Receipt-freeness ⨯ ⨯  ⨯ ⨯    ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
Coercion resistance ⨯  ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
Robustness ⨯ ⨯  ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
References
Security Requirements [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]
Eligibility           
Anonymity  ⨯ ⨯        ⨯
Fairness    ⨯       
Auditability ⨯ ⨯     ⨯ ⨯   ⨯
 Individual verifiability     ⨯      
Universal verifiability     ⨯      ⨯
Vote-Privacy  ⨯         
Consistency ⨯ ⨯   ⨯   ⨯   ⨯
Receipt-freeness ⨯ ⨯  ⨯ ⨯    ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
Coercion resistance ⨯  ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
Robustness ⨯ ⨯  ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯ ⨯
Table 2. The pros and cons of the different references.
References Protocol Pros Cons
anonymous, binding, non-reusable, verifiable, eligible,
fair and self-tallying The main disadvantage of it does not provide
[16] Based on Quantum Blockchain. auditability consistency

Abide by the underlying of e-voting properties.

Allow a degree of decentralization. It does not provide privacy, consistency and
[17] Used blockchain as a transparent ballot box.
auditability.
Provide for the elector to modify/update th ei r
vote within the allowable voting phase.
Design blockchain-based protocol named Eligibility , Fairness, Vote privacy, Receipt-freeness,
[18] Verify-Your-Vote ( VYV). Verifiability This protocol not support the anonymity.

Design the blockchain-based protocol Public Verifiability ,Dependability , Dependability, The robustness and fairness is the limitations.
[19] without a trusted third party.
Consistency, Auditability, Transparency, Anonymity.
Proposed protocol preserves end-to-end Detectability, correct ability.
[20] privacy. It does not provide consistency and fairness.

Proposed blockchain based protocol using It guarantee and protect the anonymity of the voting
[21] homomorphic ElGamal encryption. scheme. The main disadvantage not support robustness.

Designed a synchronized model.

Achieves the essential security and privacy
[22] Designed a user credential model. requirements of e-voting process. Countermeasures a t t a c k s is problem.
Designed a withdrawal model.
Used Prêt à Voter e-voting method. Secure digital voting without jeopardizing
[23] cryptographic hashes to secure end-to-end It allowed multiple votes to one user.
verification.
Combining the secret sharing scheme and It provide preserving the anonymity of the voter’s The fairness is the main problem in this scheme.
[24] homomorphic encryption. identity.
Design smart contract using the ethereum The main disadvantage not support robustness
[25] wallets and the Solidity language. Design Android a pplication for the voting system. and not support the receipt-freeness f e a t u r e .

The proposed system security scheme is Transmitted data privacy, Voter confidentiality.
[26] based on Merkle root hash. The robustness and anonymity is the limitations.
No duplication cases during the voting.

10) The author’s in [25], implemented and tested a sample of sure the counted votes are authentic as well. Otherwise the
secure e-voting application on a smaller scale as a smart contract outcome will not be fair and democratic. The other properties
using the ethereum wallets and the Solidity language. Further, an need to be included in e-voting systems based blockchain are:
Android platform has been appropriated to enable voting for
people who do not have an ethereum wallet. 1) Anonymity: In e-voting systems, the need for anonymity is
complicated because, in all aspects, we don’t want anonymity. To
11) The authors in [26], proposed a model to secure the e-voting stop people from voting multiple times and committing certain
system based blockchain (SecEVS) for the university campus types of fraud, they need to be able to verify who is voting.
election. The proposed method was validated during the security However, we want the votes themselves to be anonymous. It can
analysis phase. The proposed system security scheme is based on lead to bullying or coercion if the government, opposition party,
Merkle root hash. Further, the system maintained the following: or anyone else can find out who a person voted for. This would
jeopardize voting credibility.
 Transmitted data privacy.
 Voter confidentiality. 2) Accessibility: Accessibility must be taken into account by all
 The uniqueness of the ballot which that there are no voters. It would be nice to encourage everyone to vote and make
duplication cases during the voting. the process easier to vote from their own location. At the same
time, we don’t want an overly technical system that makes voting
5. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK impossible for some segments of the population.
A successful e-voting system requires several key features to
3) Scalability: Blockchain scalability still in its early days. So the
balance out. Security and privacy issues are undoubtedly one of
time to put a transaction in the block and the time to reach the
the most critical factors because we want to avoid being able to
consensus still needs an improvement.
manipulate the outcomes by any adversaries or self-interested
parties and maintain the election integrity. We believed that 4) Speed: It is best if in a relatively short period of time we will
blockchain had improved some of the security and privacy aspects. obtain the results. If it took a long time to determine the count of
However, there is still room for improvement. We want to make
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greatly from what it was when the votes were cast. 2017, white paper.
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