Secure Online Voting Protocol With Blind Signatures And Identity Verification

Abstract

Delays and security remain major issues in traditional manual voting, while in the emerging electronic voting, trust and privacy remain issues in its adoption. This research presents the design and development of a secure electronic voting protocol that combines biometric verification of a standard identity with cryptography to preserve election integrity. This research follows the Design Science Research Methodology, producing the protocol as an artefact, beginning with quick work on it and iteratively improving it during development. The proposed architecture uses a combined National Identity verification and Liveness detection procedure for user authentication, ensuring voter uniqueness and preventing impersonation. It also integrates the RSA blind signature protocol to prevent direct linking of votes to their voters. It uses Paillier encryption to safeguard votes both in transit and at rest, and this encryption scheme has a homomorphic property that enables aggregation of encrypted votes and decryption of the final tally. It uses the SHA-256 cryptographic hashing algorithm, the HMAC authentication technique and the AES-GCM encryption to secure the integrity of data. It also uses zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate the correctness of encrypted votes and decrypted tallies. Testing showed that it prevented a photo spoofing attempt and also blocked authentication using a person’s mother’s identity data. Also, when the blinded vote is compared with the unblinded, via local logs on the development system, there is no direct link. The whole system shows a secure electronic voting protocol that is easy to use and can be trusted.