Æternum: A Decentralized Voting System with Unconditional Privacy

Abstract

Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems allow voters to cast their votes in an uncontrolled, distributed environment. At the same time, the REV system must provide ballot privacy and verifiability of the final tally. Research has proposed REV schemes offering ballot privacy based on computational intractability assumptions, but only a few provide Unconditional Privacy (UP). Therefore, this work proposes Æternum, a REV system with a voting scheme providing UP. Æternum does not require trust in a central authority, nor does it assume computational intractability of an underlying mathematical problem to provide UP. To satisfy UP's minimal trust assumptions, Æternum uses a permissioned Distributed Ledger (DL), that forms a decentralized network of permissioned nodes, which serve as a transparent, tamper-proof Decentralized Public Bulletin Board (DPBB).