=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2588/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=Anonymous Decentralized E-Voting System
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2588/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-2588
|authors=Oleksandr Kurbatov,Pavel Kravchenko,Oleksiy Shapoval,Nikolay Poluyanenko,Mariana Malchyk,Alina Sakun,Vladyslav Kovtun
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cmigin/KurbatovKSPMSK19
}}
==Anonymous Decentralized E-Voting System==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2588/paper2.pdf
Anonymous Decentralized E-Voting System
Oleksandr Kurbatov 1[0000-0002-8237-4377], Pavel Kravchenko 2[0000-0002-0456-3295],
Oleksiy Shapoval 3[0000-0003-4478-3193], Nikolay Poluyanenko 3[0000-0001-9386-2547],
Mariana Malchyk 4[0000-0002-0917-191X], Alina Sakun 5[0000-0002-0910-4055]
and Vladyslav Kovtun 6 [0000-0002-1408-5805]
1
Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, Kharkiv, Ukraine
olkurbatov@gmail.com
2
Distributed Lab, Kharkiv, Ukraine
pavel@distributedlab.com
3
V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine
alex.shapoval@protonmail.com, nlfsr01@gmail.com
4
National University of Water and Environmental Engineering, Rivne, Ukraine
m.malchyk@nuwm.edu.ua
5
Kherson State Agricultural University, Kherson, Ukraine
agorg@ukr.net
6
National Aviation University, Kyiv, Ukraine
vlad.kovtun@gmail.com
Abstract. This document describes the principles for building an anonymous
decentralized e-voting system. It is proposed to use a ring signature mechanism
to ensure anonymity of voters and blockchain technology to ensure the integrity
and transparency of the transaction history. Thus, it can be beneficial to use
such a combination to ensure the maximal robustness of the systems in the real-
world conditions with the persistence of a potential malefactor that is interested
to disrupt the work of the system, change the data in some way or influence the
processes that are happening inside of the system.
Keywords: blockchain technology; public key infrastructure; decentralized sys-
tem; e-voting system
1 Introduction
Voting is a method for a group, such as a meeting or an electorate, in order to make a
collective decision or express an opinion, usually following discussions, debates or
election campaigns [1-3].
Traditional voting systems have ceased to be effective in terms of their require-
ments [1, 4-7]: paper ballots, pseudo-anonymity of voters, non-transparency of the
vote count (this is especially critical for the current field of research), the dependence
of (the entire) voting procedure on the central organization. In fact, these are only the
most critical problems existing in existing voting systems.
In recent years, the digitization of the voting process is developing more and more
actively. The most prominent examples are the introduction of a digital voting system
for electing local authorities in Estonia since 2005 and attempts to introduce such a
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attrib-
ution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) CMiGIN-2019: International Workshop on Conflict Management in
Global Information Networks.
system in Switzerland, Netherlands, India and Namibia [8-10]. However, existing
solutions still have several flaws, in particular, vulnerabilities associated with the
central authority checking all results [11-14].
The described approach allows conduct e-voting while ensuring the transparency
of processes and the integrity of the voting history [8, 9]. However, some voting sys-
tems also require another property for system users anonymity [14-17]. It is necessary
to further investigate the methods and mechanisms of cryptographic protection of
information [18-29], various protocols for ensuring integrity, authenticity, confidenti-
ality and other security services [30-37].
Further, we will describe how to ensure voters’ anonymity while maintaining all
other properties of an accounting system.
2 Ring signature mechanism
Ring signatures are used to ensure the anonymity of users among a specific set of
other members of a group (ring). To generate such a signature, the user uses the pub-
lic keys of other users and his key pair. When verifying a signature, a verifier can
verify that it was calculated by one of the members of the ring, but it is not known by
whom exactly [38].
Imagine a group of n users, as in Figure 1. Each user has his own key pair — a se-
cret and public key (sk, PK). Secret keys are known only to their owners, public keys
- to all participants of the system.
Fig. 1. Ring formation process
In order to form a signature on behalf of the group, the user must input the public
keys of all the ring participants (including his own) to the algorithm input, and use his
own private key as a secret. Recall that the public keys of each of the participants are
publicly available. Figure 2 shows how the ring signature is generated by the user
number 4.
Fig. 2. Signature calculation process
Fig. 3. Ring signature verification process
When the verifier verifies the value of the signature, he can verify that the signa-
ture was generated by one of the group members, however it is unknown by whom.
Only with a probability of 1 / n can he determine that the signature was calculated by
a specific participant in the ring (Figure 3). It is worth noting that the user can be
disclosed only in the case of collusion of all the other members of the group [39].
3 Architecture of Decentralized E-Voting System
The decentralized anonymous voting system consists of the following elements:
Validators;
User identity system;
End users.
Schematically, the arrangement of components and their interconnection can be
represented in Figure 4.
Nodes validators are the main nodes of the system. They process user transactions
and reach consensus on a distributed database.
User identification systems are required to provide information about user identifi-
ers with which users will prove their right to vote. The identification system can be
either a centralized internal (or external) identity provider, or a distributed identifica-
tion and certification system.
End users perform the role of voters in the system. They independently vote for
making a certain decision. It is important to ensure their anonymity, and at the same
time transparency in the voting process.
Fig. 4. E-voting system components
In order to vote, the user needs to form and sign the corresponding transaction. The
transaction structure is as follows (Figure 5):
Transaction ID
Nonce
Candidate ID
Timestamp
Public keys of group
Signature
Fig. 5. Transaction structure
Now let’s look at the transaction class that was implemented using the Java pro-
gramming language and make a quick overview of its methods.
public class Transaction {
private byte[] txID;
private int nonce;
private byte[] candidateID;
private long timestamp;
private byte[] signature;
}
...
public void printTxID();
private byte[] generateTxID(int nonce, byte[] candi-
dateID, long timestamp, byte[] signature);
public void printTransaction();
private byte[] signTransaction(int nonce, byte[] candi-
dateID, long timestamp);
printTxID allows to see the transaction identifier in HEX form to verify it and use
in other parts of the real system;
generateTxID implements a SHA-256 algorithm to hash transaction contents. The
resulting hash is used as an ID;
printTransaction allows to see the transaction contents in the console and can be
modified so these contents can be used in other parts of the real system;
signTransaction implements the ring signature mechanism to sign the contents of
transaction.
The transaction identifier is a hash value from all other transaction fields. The
nonce field contains a random value and is used to make the transaction unique. Can-
didate ID contains the identifier of the voting entity for which the voter wants to cast
his vote. Timestamp - UNIX value of the transaction formation time. Public keys of
group is a list of public keys of the participants of the ring (those used to generate the
signature). Among these keys is also the voter’s public key, but his position is un-
known. Signature is the transaction signature value. Note that this transaction struc-
ture is not strict, additional fields may be present.
In order to sign a transaction and at the same time ensure the anonymity of the
vote, the user selects a list of keys of other users. At the same time, it is important that
the selected public keys really belong to other voters (they had permission to vote).
The list of public keys of voters should be open to all participants in the system. This
list is formed before the start of voting (registered and provided the public key - got
into the voter list).
The number of selected keys depends on the level of anonymity of the voter. If the
selected group is small, then the probability of de-anonymization of the voter is much
higher [40].
After the user selects a set of public keys, he calculates the value of the ring signa-
ture for the transaction. After that, it sends the transaction to one of the platform vali-
dators (or several) as in Figure 6.
After the validator receives a transaction, he must verify that the sender has the
right to vote. Note that the validator does not know the identifier of the sender of the
transaction (or rather, he does not know which of the public keys specified in the
transaction belongs to the voter). Therefore, it needs to check the permissions of all
keys specified in the transaction.
If all the specified keys have permission to vote, then the transaction is correct and
can be confirmed [41]. At this stage, there is also a need to check that the user cannot
conduct several transactions from different groups (since the sender of each transac-
tion is unknown, then without a protection mechanism, the attacker can conduct
transactions by constantly changing groups, and all of them will be valid). The image
of a secret key is used as a protective mechanism [39].
Fig. 6. Transaction formation process
Since this image is unique for each key pair (and it is used in creating and verifying
signatures), the user cannot sign several transactions using the same secret key. The
transaction confirmation process is shown in Figure 7.
Fig. 7. Transaction verification process
4 Conclusion
Using the described approach to build an anonymous e-voting system allows you
to achieve the following benefits:
the ability to verify voter permissions (voting rights);
anonymity;
the ability of the voter to verify the correctness of his vote;
inability to conduct a double waste attack.
On the one hand, this approach allows validators to check whether the sender of a
transaction has the right to vote (if he used the existing public keys of other partici-
pants to form the ring).
At the same time, a specific voter can only be determined by validators with a cer-
tain probability (the larger the ring size, the less likely it is). In addition, a user can be
completely deanonymized if all of the other members of the group collude (and reveal
their votes).
Each user can make sure that his voice has been added to the distributed registry
(request to the validator or using SPV-approach [42-43]). In addition, each owner of
the complete history can verify that the voting results correspond to the set of com-
pleted transactions.
The user cannot create new transactions with different groups, if you use the mech-
anism of protection against attacks with double costs (the image of the private key,
details with signature mechanism in [39]).
Also based on this scheme, the user may be allowed to change the value of his
voice. In this case, not one transaction will be counted, but the last transaction that
was added to the block chain. However, in this case it is necessary to develop and
implement security measures to prevent spam attacks and other attacks that may af-
fect system performance [44-48], as well as data stored in the chain [49-53].
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