Provotum: A Blockchain-based and End-to-end Verifiable Remote Electronic Voting System

While the existence of Public Bulletin Boards (PBB) is often formulated as an assumption in related work on Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems, this work here on Provotum focuses on the practical design and architecture of such a PBB, including its distributed execution. Further, Provotum leverages a public permissioned Blockchain (BC) as a PBB, where only authorized entities can sign blocks, while the general public can verify all BC data.Therefore, Provotum defines a new and fully decentralized BC-based REV system, which deploys a permissioned BC as a PBB and allows for the explicit distribution of trust across different permissioned BC nodes. Provotum is operated in a fully distributed fashion by using Smart Contracts (SC), Distributed Key Generation (DKG), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Cooperative Decryption (CD), as well as employing client-side encryption, which enables ballot secrecy, while the BC forms an audit trail, enabling public and End-to-end Verifiability (E2E-V).

[1]  Daniel Davis Wood,et al.  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2014 .

[2]  Mark Ryan,et al.  Election Verifiability in Electronic Voting Protocols , 2010, ESORICS.

[3]  Jun Pang,et al.  Bulletin Boards in Voting Systems: Modelling and Measuring Privacy , 2011, 2011 Sixth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security.

[4]  B. Stiller,et al.  Smart Contracts – Blockchains in the Wings , 2018 .

[5]  Feng Hao,et al.  A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy , 2017, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[6]  Josh Benaloh,et al.  Receipt-Free Secret-Ballot Elections , 1994, STOC 1994.

[7]  Robert Krimmer.  A Structure for New Voting Technologies: What They Are, How They Are Used and Why , 2019, The Art of Structuring.

[8]  Whitfield Diffie,et al.  New Directions in Cryptography , 1976, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[9]  Christopher Charnes,et al.  Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook , 2009 .

[10]  Taher El Gamal.  A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms , 1984, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[11]  Feng Hao,et al.  Real-world electronic voting : design, analysis and deployment , 2016 .

[12]  David Chaum,et al.  Secret-ballot receipts: True voter-verifiable elections , 2004, IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine.

[13]  Satoshi Nakamoto.  Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[14]  Vitalik Buterin.  A NEXT GENERATION SMART CONTRACT & DECENTRALIZED APPLICATION PLATFORM , 2015 .

[15]  Warren D. Smith,et al.  Cryptography meets voting , 2005 .

[16]  Burkhard Stiller,et al.  Design and implementation of cast-as-intended verifiability for a blockchain-based voting system , 2020, SAC.

[17]  Konstantinos Markantonakis,et al.  E-Voting With Blockchain: An E-Voting Protocol with Decentralisation and Voter Privacy , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData).

[18]  Rolf Haenni,et al.  CHVote System Specification , 2017, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[19]  David A. Basin,et al.  Fixing the Achilles Heel of E-Voting: The Bulletin Board , 2021, 2021 IEEE 34th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF).

[20]  Amos Fiat,et al.  How to Prove Yourself: Practical Solutions to Identification and Signature Problems , 1986, CRYPTO.

[21]  Yonggang Wen,et al.  A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks , 2018, IEEE Access.

[22]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  Self-tallying Elections and Perfect Ballot Secrecy , 2002, Public Key Cryptography.

[23]  Mikhail J. Atallah,et al.  Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook , 2009, Chapman & Hall/CRC Applied Algorithms and Data Structures series.

[24]  David Chaum,et al.  Wallet Databases with Observers , 1992, CRYPTO.

[25]  Claus-Peter Schnorr,et al.  Efficient signature generation by smart cards , 2004, Journal of Cryptology.

[26]  Dan Boneh.  Solidity , 1973 .

[27]  Arthur Gervais,et al.  Do you Need a Blockchain? , 2018, 2018 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT).

[28]  Feng Hao,et al.  Schnorr Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof , 2017, RFC.

[29]  Ben Smyth,et al.  A foundation for secret, verifiable elections , 2018, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[30]  Frederik Armknecht,et al.  A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption , 2015, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[31]  Véronique Cortier,et al.  Election Verifiability for Helios under Weaker Trust Assumptions , 2014, ESORICS.

[32]  Philip B. Stark,et al.  End-to-end verifiability , 2015, ArXiv.

[33]  Justin Cappos,et al.  CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds , 2017, USENIX Security Symposium.

[34]  Amr M. Youssef,et al.  Scalable Open-Vote Network on Ethereum , 2020, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[35]  John K. Ousterhout,et al.  In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm , 2014, USENIX ATC.

[36]  Yi Liu,et al.  An E-voting Protocol Based on Blockchain , 2017, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[37]  C. Andrew Neff,et al.  A verifiable secret shuffle and its application to e-voting , 2001, CCS '01.

[38]  Markus Jakobsson,et al.  Coercion-resistant electronic elections , 2005, WPES '05.

[39]  Jun Pang,et al.  Privacy and verifiability in voting systems: Methods, developments and trends , 2013, Comput. Sci. Rev..

[40]  Ben Smyth,et al.  Attacking and Fixing Helios: An Analysis of Ballot Secrecy , 2011, 2011 IEEE 24th Computer Security Foundations Symposium.

[41]  Kazue Sako,et al.  Receipt-Free Mix-Type Voting Scheme - A Practical Solution to the Implementation of a Voting Booth , 1995, EUROCRYPT.

[42]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults , 1980, JACM.

[43]  Eric Dubuis.  E-Demokratie: E-Voting , 2019, Handbuch E-Government.

[44]  Ronald Cramer,et al.  A Secure and Optimally Efficient Multi-Authority Election Scheme ( 1 ) , 2000 .