A Survey on Feasibility and Suitability of Blockchain Techniques for the E-Voting Systems

International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

2018/3 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.07175.pdf

Introduction

• Recent major technical challenges

  • Anonymous vote-casting

  • Ballot casting verifiability by (and only by) the voter

  • Secure digital identity management

    • Any potential voter should have been enrolled

  • Individualized ballot processes

    • hashed, encrypted etc...

Introduction

Introduction

•  common problems of current e-voting applications

  • High initial setup costs

  • Lack of transparency and trust

  • Voting delays or inefficiencies related to remote/absentee voting

  • Increasing security problems

  • Double-voting or voters from the other region

Introduction

 Implementations and Design Decisions

• Proof of Identity

  • ID cards, digital residence code, ...

• User Interface

• Token

  • defined as a type of digital asset

  • used to fulfill all the functions of that service

• Ledger

• Programming Languages

• Open Source

Introduction >  Implementations and Design Decisions

Introduction >  Implementations and Design Decisions

 Implementations and Design Decisions

Feasibility Analysis

• feasibility

  • cost-effective, scalable, secure, and easy-to-deploy system

• how to measure?

  • considered some thresholds or factors in order to determine whether it is feasible to replace the existing (and prospective) structures with their blockchain-based counterparts, or not.

Feasibility Analysis

Feasibility Analysis

•  Constraint

  • Any blockchain-based solution should be (noticeably) cheaper

    • 3-years period with at least 1 elections per year

    • may need to support millions of people

  • The security level should not be lower than non-blockchain solutions

Feasibility Analysis

Feasibility Analysis

• Blockchain solutions are suitable, when the following characteristics are present in the legacy subject systems

  • Shared data

  • Multiple parties

  • Low trust

  • No trusted third party

  • Auditability

    • If we want the records to be immutable

Feasibility Analysis

Feasibility Analysis

Feasibility Analysis

Blockchain Fundamentals

• Blockchain solutions are suitable, when the following characteristics are present in the legacy subject systems

  • Shared data

  • Multiple parties

  • Low trust

  • No trusted third party

  • Auditability

    • If we want the records to be immutable

Feasibility Analysis > Blockchain Fundamentals

Social Aspects

• Several studies showed that the trust in e-vote are considerably low (or at least not high as the traditional systems)

  • Estonia still holds both traditional and online elections together

• popular cryptocurrency like Bitcoin may strengthen the perception of trust

• ​If the software is open source public opinion and trust will even be higher

Feasibility Analysis > Social Aspects

Financial Aspects

• lower the administrative costs in the long term despite of higher initial costs

• cost from the point of view of the voters is analyzed in another work in Estonia

  • who live at least 30 minutes distance from their voting centers are more likely to prefer voting online

Feasibility Analysis > Financial Aspects

Security and Reliability

Feasibility Analysis > Security and Reliability

Security and Reliability

• authentication is implemented by asymmetric cryptology in crypto coins

  • ensures the integrity and authentication of the user/voter accounts

  • authenticating the users themselves remains as an open problem

Feasibility Analysis > Security and Reliability

Comparison with Alternatives

• compared the distributed model with centralized solutions

• relational database vs blockchain

  • Requirements

    • voters’ identities must not have any kind of relation with their casted votes

    • duplicate voting must be prevented

    • voters should be able to verify their ballots

    • vote storage/counting phases should be time trackable.

Feasibility Analysis > Comparison with Alternatives

Comparison with Alternatives

• => Providing all these features at the same time is very hard with the classical relational databases

• Conversely, these can be implemented easily with a blockchain based system

Feasibility Analysis > Comparison with Alternatives

Comparison with Alternatives

• scalability

  • highly implementation and consensus protocol dependent

  • transaction rate may vary from 30 per second up to many more

  • speed and security is trade-off

Feasibility Analysis > Comparison with Alternatives

SWOT Analysis

• Our analysis showed that, the potential gains of holding blockchain-based online elections are significant and worth developing

Feasibility Analysis > SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis

Feasibility Analysis > SWOT Analysis

Conclusion

• Blockchain may seem perfect, but we are not yet fully aware of all the risks regarding security and scalability, as blockchain-based e-voting systems are still on the testing phase

• remote participation does not seem to be secure enough with the current technology

  • risks regarding the personal ID authentication

Conclusion