An efficient and secure privacy-preserving E-voting system with blockchain, homomorphic encryption, and ZKP

Abstract

E-voting has undergone significant advancements in recent years, nevertheless, ensuring the privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of voters' identities and their votes remains a crucial challenge. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized architecture and immutability, provides a promising solution for developing secure and transparent E-voting systems. Blockchain improves integrity and non-repudiation, however, its transparency compromises voters' anonymity, and the secrecy of vote contents. We propose in this paper an E-voting system that incorporates secure and privacy-preserving mechanisms based on a combination of Blockchain, and lightweight cryptographic techniques to address these issues, while mitigating the weaknesses of the most recent works such as Thakkar et al.'s voting system in which votes remain unencrypted. Moreover, the integration of advanced cryptographic techniques, as explored in Wang et al.'s work, inevitably introduces significant computational costs. The proposed system enables the verification of voter eligibility and the correctness of votes without revealing sensitive information while reducing computational costs. In our experimentation, we adopt smart contracts to implement the proposed system using solidity programming language, and deployed on Ethereum Blockchain. We evaluated our proposed system in terms of execution time and gas consumption. The obtained results proved its effectiveness compared to the most recent works.