Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchains are governed by a committee of dozens of members elected via coin-based voting mechanisms. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of two critical characteristics, personal impact and participation rate, of three leading DPoS blockchains. Our findings reveal the existence of decisive voters whose votes can alter election outcomes, as well as the fact that almost half of the coins have never been used in committee elections. Our research contributes to demystifying the actual use of coin-based voting governance and offers novel insights into the potential security risks of DPoS blockchains.
In today’s digital environment, the voting system has moved from paper based to a digital system. A digital e-voting system has many properties such as transparency, decentralization, irreversibility, and non-repudiation. The growth in the digital e-voting system raises many security and transparency issues. In this paper, we used the blockchain technology in the digital electronic voting system to solve the security issues and ful?ll the system requirements. It offers new opportunities to deploy a secure e-voting system in any organization or country. The solution is far better as compared to other solutions because it is a decentralized system, containing the results in the form of bit-coins, having different locations. We will also analyze the security of our proposed voting system, which shows our protocol is more secure as compared to other solutions. The paper proposes a novel electronic voting system based on block chain that addresses some of the limitations in existing systems and evaluates some of the popular blockchain frameworks for the purpose of constructing a blockchain based e-voting system. In particular, we evaluate the potential of distributed ledger technologies through the description of a case study namely, the process of an election, and the implementation of a blockchain based application, which improves the security and decreases the cost of hosting a nation wide election.
Federated learning (FL) is a technique that involves multiple participants who update their local models with private data and aggregate these models using a central server. Unfortunately, central servers are prone to single-point failures during the aggregation process, which leads to data leakage and other problems. Although many studies have shown that a blockchain can solve the single-point failure of servers, blockchains cannot identify or mitigate the effect of backdoor attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based FL framework for defense against backdoor attacks. The framework utilizes blockchains to record transactions in an immutable distributed ledger network and enables decentralized FL. Furthermore, by incorporating the reverse layer-wise relevance (RLR) aggregation strategy into the participant’s aggregation algorithm and adding gradient noise to limit the effectiveness of backdoor attacks, the accuracy of backdoor attacks is substantially reduced. Furthermore, we designed a new proof-of-stake mechanism that considers the historical stakes of participants and the accuracy for selecting the miners of the local model, thereby reducing the stake rewards of malicious participants and motivating them to upload honest model parameters. Our simulation results confirm that, for 10% of malicious participants, the success rate of backdoor injection is reduced by nearly 90% compared to Vanilla FL, and the stake income of malicious devices is the lowest.
Roseline Oluwaseun Ogundokun, Micheal Olaolu Arowolo, Robertas Damaševičius, Sanjay Misra
The recent progress in blockchain and wireless communication infrastructures has paved the way for creating blockchain-based systems that protect data integrity and enable secure information sharing. Despite these advancements, concerns regarding security and privacy continue to impede the widespread adoption of blockchain technology, especially when sharing sensitive data. Specific security attacks against blockchains, such as data poisoning attacks, privacy leaks, and a single point of failure, must be addressed to develop efficient blockchain-supported IT infrastructures. This study proposes the use of deep learning methods, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and convolutional neural network LSTM (CNN-LSTM), to detect phishing attacks in a blockchain transaction network. These methods were evaluated on a dataset comprising malicious and benign addresses from the Ethereum blockchain dark list and whitelist dataset, and the results showed an accuracy of 99.72%.
Javier José Díaz Rivera, Waleed Akbar, Talha Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Afaq · 5 authors
Zero Trust Networking (ZTN) is a security model where no default trust is given to entities in a network infrastructure. The first bastion of security for achieving ZTN is strong identity verification. Several standard methods for assuring a robust identity exist (E.g., OAuth2.0, OpenID Connect). These standards employ JSON Web Tokens (JWT) during the authentication process. However, the use of JWT for One Time Token (OTT) enrollment has a latent security issue. A third party can intercept a JWT, and the payload information can be exposed, revealing the details of the enrollment server. Furthermore, an intercepted JWT could be used for enrollment by an impersonator as long as the JWT remains active. Our proposed mechanism aims to secure the ownership of the OTT by including the JWT as encrypted metadata into a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The mechanism uses the blockchain Public Key of the intended owner for encrypting the JWT. The blockchain assures the JWT ownership by mapping it to the intended owner's blockchain public address. Our proposed mechanism is applied to an emerging Zero Trust framework (OpenZiti) alongside a permissioned Ethereum blockchain using Hyperledger Besu. The Zero Trust Framework provides enrollment functionality. At the same time, our proposed mechanism based on blockchain and NFT assures the secure distribution of OTTs that is used for the enrollment of identities.
A generalized scheme of remote electronic voice based on homomorphic encryption is considered. Two methods of protecting the voting system from the threat from the voter, consisting in incorrect filling of the ballot by the voter, are investigated. Both methods are based on the algorithms of “zero-knowledge proof”. Evaluations of the complexity of calculations in the formation of proof of the correctness of filling in the ballot by the voter and Evaluations of the complexity of verification of the proof by the controlling party are obtained. A comparative analysis of the complexity of the implementation of both methods has shown that the method based on the proof based on the equality of logarithms has less complexity of calculations on the voter's side compared to the method based on the mixing of votes. At the same time, the second method (the method of mixing votes) requires 1.67 times less calculations in the blockchain, which becomes a significant factor in choosing the second method in favor of a large number of voters.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Prof. Afsha Akkalot, Parth Vijaykumar Lashkare, Hemant Patel, Dharmendrasingh Rajpurohit
Abstract: The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for the development of secured e-voting systems that are transparent, immutable, and tamper-proof. In this survey report, we examine the current trends and future prospects of using blockchain technology for e-voting. We begin by exploring the key features of blockchain technology, including distributed ledger, cryptographic security, and decentralized consensus mechanisms. Next, we discuss the benefits of using blockchain technology for e-voting, including voter anonymity, transparent voting process, and immutable voting records. To gain a better understanding of the current state of the field, we conducted a survey of recent literature on blockchain-based evoting systems. The survey covers research articles, white papers, and conference proceedings published in the last five years. We analysed the data using statistical software and present our findings on the most commonly used consensus algorithms, cryptographic techniques, and blockchain architectures in e-voting systems. Our survey also highlights the challenges facing the adoption of blockchain-based e-voting systems, including scalability, usability, and regulatory issues. We conclude by discussing the future prospects of blockchain-based e-voting systems and identifying the areas that require further research and development. Overall, this survey report provides valuable insights into the current trends and future prospects of using blockchain technology for e-voting, and will be useful for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working in this field.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for deciding if a transaction is appended to the blockchain or not. In 2022, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a Bitcoin mixer and an Ethereum application, putting the neutrality of permissionless blockchains to the test. In this paper, we formalize quantify and analyze the security impact of blockchain censorship. We start by defining censorship, followed by a quantitative assessment of current censorship practices. We find that 46% of Ethereum blocks were made by censoring actors that intend to comply with OFAC sanctions, indicating the significant impact of OFAC sanctions on the neutrality of public blockchains. We further uncover that censorship not only impacts neutrality, but also security. We show how after Ethereum's move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and adoption of Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) the inclusion of censored transactions was delayed by an average of 85%. Inclusion delays compromise a transaction's security by, e.g., strengthening a sandwich adversary. Finally we prove a fundamental limitation of PoS and Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols against censorship resilience.
Blockchain technology has gained significant attention as a solution for ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and availability in a trustless environment.Its main objective is to safeguard data from both internal and external cyberattacks by leveraging the collective power of the network to counter malicious attempts.In this project, we aim to develop a decentralized messaging application using XMTP (replace with the correct protocol if applicable).Our application will enable secure and anonymous transmission of encrypted messages.The Ethereum platform will be utilized for deploying our blockchain network.By utilizing a distributed architecture and a flexible communication protocol, our application will be resilient against various forms of suppression.XMTP's extensible design allows for a wide range of use cases in exchanging message data between web3 identities.Additionally, the XMTP network ensures message persistence and associates them with web3 identities rather than specific client apps.As a result, each web3 identity possesses a portable inbox accessible through any XMTP-enabled client application.
Johnnatan Messias, Vabuk Pahari, B. Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi · 5 authors
Smart contracts are contractual agreements between participants of a blockchain, who cannot implicitly trust one another. They are software programs that run on top of a blockchain, and we may need to change them from time to time (e.g., to fix bugs or address new use cases). Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing these smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound and Uniswap -- two widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in both Compound and Uniswap: 10 voters hold together 57.86% and 44.72% of the voting power, respectively. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor within the Compound protocol, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and we discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users.
Phishing is a widespread scam activity on Ethereum, causing huge financial losses to victims. Most existing phishing scam detection methods abstract accounts on Ethereum as nodes and transactions as edges, then use manual statistics of static node features to obtain node embedding and finally identify phishing scams through classification models. However, these methods can not dynamically learn new Ethereum transactions. Since the phishing scams finished in a short time, a method that can detect phishing scams in real-time is needed. In this paper, we propose a streaming phishing scam detection method. To achieve streaming detection and capture the dynamic changes of Ethereum transactions, we first abstract transactions into edge features instead of node features, and then design a broadcast mechanism and a storage module, which integrate historical transaction information and neighbor transaction information to strengthen the node embedding. Finally, the node embedding can be learned from the storage module and the previous node embedding. Experimental results show that our method achieves decent performance on the Ethereum phishing scam detection task.
Blockchain is the foundation of all cryptocurrencies, while machine learning (ML) is one of the most popular technologies with a wide range of possibilities. Blockchain may be improved and made more effective by using ML. Even though blockchain technology uses encryption to safeguard data, it is not completely reliable. Various elements, including the particular use case, the type of data, and legal constraints can determine whether it is suitable for keeping private and sensitive data. While there may be benefits, it is important to take into account possible hazards and abide by privacy and security laws. The blockchain itself is secure, but additional applications and layers are not. In terms of security, ML can aid in the development of blockchain applications. Therefore, a critical investigation is required to better understand the function of ML and blockchain in enhancing security. This study examines the current situation, evaluates the articles it contains, and presents an overview of the security issues. Despite their existing limitations, the papers included from 2012 to 2022 highlighted the importance of ML’s impact on blockchain security. ML and blockchain can enhance security, but challenges remain; advances such as federated learning and zero-knowledge proofs are important, and future research should focus on privacy and integration with other technologies.
Omid Mir, Daniel Slamanig, Balthazar Bauer, René Mayrhofer
Anonymous credentials (ACs) systems are a powerful cryptographic tool for privacy-preserving applications and provide strong user privacy guarantees for authentication and access control. ACs allow users to prove possession of attributes encoded in a credential without revealing any information beyond them. A delegatable AC (DAC) system is an enhanced AC system that allows the owners of credentials to delegate the obtained credential to other users. This allows to model hierarchies as usually encountered within public-key infrastructures (PKIs). DACs also provide stronger privacy guarantees than traditional AC systems since the identities of issuers and delegators can also be hidden. In this paper we present a novel DAC scheme that supports attributes, provides anonymity for delegations, allows the delegators to restrict further delegations, and also comes with an efficient construction. Our approach builds on a new primitive that we call structure-preserving signatures on equivalence classes on updatable commitments (SPSEQ-UC). The high-level idea is to use a special signature scheme that can sign vectors of set commitments, where signatures can be extended by additional set commitments. Signatures additionally include a user's public key, which can be switched. This allows us to efficiently realize delegation in the DAC. Similar to conventional SPSEQ, the signatures and messages can be publicly randomized and thus allow unlinkable delegation and showings in the DAC system. We present further optimizations such as cross-set commitment aggregation that, in combination, enable efficient selective showing of attributes in the DAC without using costly zero-knowledge proofs. We present an efficient instantiation that is proven to be secure in the generic group model and finally demonstrate the practical efficiency of our DAC by presenting performance benchmarks based on an implementation.
Bruno Pereira, José Manuel Torres, Pedro Sobral, Rui S. Moreira · 6 authors
Since its appearance in 2008, blockchain technology has found multiple uses in fields such as banking, supply chain management, and healthcare. One of the most intriguing uses of blockchain is in voting systems, where the technology can overcome the security and transparency concerns that plague traditional voting systems. This paper provides a thorough examination of the implementation of a blockchain-based voting system. The proposed system employs cryptographic methods to protect voters’ privacy and anonymity while ensuring the verifiability and integrity of election results. Digital signatures, homomorphic encryption (He), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus method underpin the system. A review of the literature on the use of blockchain technology for voting systems supports the analysis and the technical and logistical constraints connected with implementing the suggested system. The study suggests solutions to problems such as managing voter identification and authentication, ensuring accessibility for all voters, and dealing with network latency and scalability. The suggested blockchain-based voting system can provide a safe and transparent platform for casting and counting votes, ensuring election results’ privacy, anonymity, and verifiability. The implementation of blockchain technology can overcome traditional voting systems’ security and transparency shortcomings while also delivering a high level of integrity and traceability.
Physical terminals provide network services to upper-layer applications, but their limited memory and processing power make it challenging to perform security updates and patches, leaving them vulnerable to known security threats. Attackers can exploit these weaknesses to control the terminals and attack the network. To restrict unauthorized access to the network and its resources, appropriate access control mechanisms are necessary. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained access control method based on smart contracts (FACSC) for terminals in software-defined networking (SDN). FACSC utilizes the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model to achieve fine-grained control over terminal access networks. To ensure the security and reliability of access control policies and terminal-related attribute information, we utilize smart contract technology to implement the ABAC model. Furthermore, we leverage the programming protocol-independent packet processor (P4) to filter and forward packets in the data plane based on the packet option field, enabling rapid terminal access. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves fine-grained secure authentication of terminals in SDN networks with a low authentication processing overhead.
Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer
Electronic voting has become popular in democratic countries, and thus the cyber security of this system is demanded. In this paper, some attacks were made on a proposed electronic election model based on blockchain technology, where the impact of each attack (Sybil, DDoS, Eclipse, Selfish mining, 51% attack) was calculated, and the time in which it achieved 51% of the attack was calculated. In this study, we investigate of Blockchain technology’s attack surface, focusing on general blockchains. The following factors show how these attacks have an impact on the proposed model: 1) The cryptographic architecture of the Blockchain. 2) The distributed architecture of systems using Blockchain. 3) The Blockchain application context. For each of these factors, we identify several attacks, including selfish mining, 51% attack, sybil attacks, eclipse attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks, consensus delay (due to selfish behavior or distributed denial-of-service attacks), blockchain forks, orphan blocks, block swallowing, wallet theft, smart contract attacks, and privacy attacks.
A blockchain-based decentralized application (DApp) refers to an application typically using web pages or mobile applications as the front-end and smart contracts as the back-end. The front-end of the DApp helps users generate transactions and send them to the user’s blockchain wallet. After the user signs and confirms the transaction using the blockchain wallet, the transaction will invoke the smart contract of the DApp. However, users bear the following risks when using DApps because of the potential inconsistent behaviors in DApps. First, the DApp front-end may generate incorrect transactions inconsistent with users’ intentions. Second, the smart contract may have misbehaviors when executing the transactions. Inconsistent behaviors of DApps not only lead to user confusion but also cause significant financial losses. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to identify inconsistent behaviors of DApps on EVM-compatible blockchains by contrasting the behaviors of DApps that derived from the front-end, blockchain wallet, and smart contracts, respectively. We implemented our approach into a prototype named DAppHunter. We have applied DAppHunter on 92 real-world DApps of Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain and successfully identified 37 DApps with inconsistent behaviors. We confirmed that 35 of them are scam DApps and over 5 million blockchain addresses are at risk of becoming victims of these inconsistent DApps.
Voting is an important procedure in democratic societies in different countries, including Iraq. Electronic voting (E-voting) is becoming more prevalent due to reducing administrative costs and burdens. E-voting systems have many restrictions that affect the electoral process. For example, fraud, tampering with ballot boxes, taking many hours to announce results, and the difficulty of reaching polling stations. Over the last decade, blockchain and smart contract technologies have gained widespread adoption in various sectors, such as cryptocurrencies, finance, banking, and most notably in e-voting systems. If utilized properly, the developer demonstrates properties that are promising for their properties, such as security, privacy, transparency, and decentralization. Moreover, these technologies allow citizens to vote wherever they are via digital technology (computers, smartphones). This paper explains the nature of blockchain and smart contracts and systematically reviews several important e-voting studies. Comparative analysis is conducted on recent related papers in the last five years (published in highly ranked journals and international conferences) regarding blockchain types, frameworks, security requirements, and the implemented algorithms.
Bitcoin transactions include unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) as their inputs and generate one or more newly owned UTXOs at specified addresses. Each U TXO can only be used as an input in a transaction once, and using it in two or more different transactions is referred to as a double-spending attack. Ultimately, due to the characteristics of the Bitcoin protocol, double-spending is impossible. However, problems may arise when a transaction is considered final even though i ts finality has not been fully guaranteed in order to achieve fast payment. In this paper, we propose an approach to detecting Bitcoin double-spending attacks using a graph neural network (GNN). This model predicts whether all nodes in the network contain a given payment transaction in their own memory pool (mempool) using information only obtained from some observer nodes in the network. Our experiment shows that the proposed model can detect double-spending with an accuracy of at least 0.95 when more than about 1% of the entire nodes in the network are observer nodes.
R. A. Zamare, Pramey Deshmukh, Chinmay Gulhane, Mohd Meeran Iqbal · 6 authors
The use of E-Voting systems has become popular in these recent years due to the ability of Blockchain environment to provide a more efficient and convenient voting process. Earlier, the security and integrity of e-voting systems has been very concerning, as they are vulnerable to cyber-attacks and manipulation. On the contrary, Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and distributed platform that can ensure the integrity and immutability of data. This research paper proposes an e-voting system based on blockchain technology. The proposed system aims to provide a secure, transparent, and tamper-proof voting process. The system utilizes smart contracts, which automates the voting processes and ensures the accuracy of the results. The system also provides transparency and accuracy, allowing voters to verify their vote and ensuring that the results are accurate and trustworthy. The proposed system will be tested and evaluated to determine its effectiveness and feasibility. The evaluation will focus on the security, scalability, and usability of the system. The security evaluation will test the system's ability to prevent attacks and ensure the confidentiality of the votes. The scalability evaluation will test the system's ability to handle a large number of voters and transactions. The usability evaluation will test the ease of use and accessibility of the system for all types of voters
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development of science and technology, the traditional centralized ballot management will lead to the risk of an opaque voting process and tampering of back-end data, and it can no longer meet the requirements of e-voting transparency and anonymity, while the distributed blockchain technology, with its features of being transparent and tamper-proof, can well solve the problems in traditional e-voting and make the ballot firmly in the hands of users. To make each node reach consensus, each node can access the complete shared ledger, and malicious nodes can analyze the transaction information in the ledger to obtain users’ voting information, which makes anonymity impossible to guarantee. We propose a blockchain technology-based voting record synchronization model and an anonymous authentication model, using zk-SNARK and Merkle tree technology, that achieve user authentication and anonymous voting. In this scheme, the user’s random identity address is inserted into the Merkle tree, and when voting, it is only necessary to prove that the user’s identity address is in the tree to complete anonymous voting without revealing the user’s real identity. This scheme meets the basic requirements of electronic voting and ensures the reliability and security of voting.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Threshold signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive used in many practical applications. As proposed by Boneh and Komlo (CRYPTO'22), TAPS is a threshold signature that is a hybrid of privacy and accountability. It enables a combiner to combine t signature shares while revealing nothing about the threshold t or signing quorum to the public and asks a tracer to track a signature to the quorum that generates it. However, TAPS has three disadvantages: it 1) structures upon a centralized model, 2) assumes that both combiner and tracer are honest, and 3) leaves the tracing unnotarized and static. In this work, we introduce Decentralized, Threshold, dynamically Accountable and Private Signature (DeTAPS) that provides decentralized combining and tracing, enhanced privacy against untrusted combiners (tracers), and notarized and dynamic tracing. Specifically, we adopt Dynamic Threshold Public-Key Encryption (DTPKE) to dynamically notarize the tracing process, design non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to achieve public verifiability of notaries, and utilize the Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption to bridge TAPS and DTPKE so as to awaken the notaries securely and efficiently. In addition, we formalize the definitions and security requirements for DeTAPS. Then we present a generic construction and formally prove its security and privacy. To evaluate the performance, we build a prototype based on SGX2 and Ethereum.
In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of smart contract upgradability patterns using proxies. A primary characteristic of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain is that they are immutable once implemented, no changes can be made. Taking human error into account, as well as technology improvements and newly discovered vulnerabilities, there has been a need to upgrade these smart contracts, which may hold enormous amounts of Ether and hence become the target of attacks. Several such attacks have caused tremendous losses in the past, as well as millions of dollars in Ether which has been locked away in broken contracts. Thus far we have collected many upgradable proxy patterns and studied their features to build a comprehensive catalog of patterns. We present a summary of these upgradable proxy patterns which we collected and studied. We scraped the source code for approximately 100000 verified contracts from Etherscan.io, the most popular block explorer for Ethereum, out of which we extracted around 64k unique files - most containing multiple contracts. We have begun to automate the analysis of these contracts using the popular static analysis tool Slither, while at the same time implementing much more robust detection of upgradable proxies using this framework. Comparing the results of the original implementation to our own, we have found that approximately 70 percent of the contracts which were initially flagged as upgradeable proxies are false positives which we have eliminated.
Privacy and verifiability are crucial security requirements in e-voting systems and combining them is considered to be a challenge given that they seem to be contradictory. On one hand, privacy means that cast votes cannot be traced to the corresponding voters. On the other hand, linkability of voters and their votes is a requirement of verifiability which has the consequence that a voter is able to check their vote in the election result. These two contradictory features can be addressed by adopting privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, which at the same time as achieving privacy, achieve verifiability. Many end-to-end schemes that support verifiability and privacy have the need for some voter action. This makes ballot casting more complex for voters. We propose the PVPBC voting system, which is an e-voting system that preserves privacy and verifiability without affecting voter usability. The PVPBC voting system uses an effective and distributed method of authorization, which is based on revocable anonymity, by making use of a permissioned distributed ledger and smart contract. In addition, the underlying PVPBC voting system satisfies election verifiability using the Selene voting scheme. The Selene protocol is a verifiable e-voting protocol. It publishes votes in plaintext accompanied by tracking numbers. This enables voters to confirm that their votes have been captured correctly by the system. Numerical experiments support the claim that PVPBC scales well as a function of the number of voters and candidates. In particular, PVPBC’s authorization time increases linearly as a function of the population size. The average latency associated with accessing the system also increases linearly with the voter population size. The latency incurred when a valid authentication transaction is created and sent on the DLT network is 6.275 ms. Empirical results suggest that the cost in GBP for casting and storing an encrypted ballot alongside a tracker commitment is a linear function of the number of candidates, which is an attractive aspect of PVPBC.