Movsowitz Davidow, Danielle, Manevich, Yacov, Toch, Eran
Differential Privacy (DP) is often presented as a strong privacy-enhancing technology with broad applicability and advocated as a de-facto standard for releasing aggregate statistics on sensitive data. However, in many embodiments, DP introduces a new attack surface: a malicious entity entrusted with releasing statistics could manipulate the results and use the randomness of DP as a convenient smokescreen to mask its nefariousness. Since revealing the random noise would obviate the purpose of introducing it, the miscreant may have a perfect alibi. To close this loophole, we introduce the idea of \textit{Verifiable Differential Privacy}, which requires the publishing entity to output a zero-knowledge proof that convinces an efficient verifier that the output is both DP and reliable. Such a definition might seem unachievable, as a verifier must validate that DP randomness was generated faithfully without learning anything about the randomness itself. We resolve this paradox by carefully mixing private and public randomness to compute verifiable DP counting queries with theoretical guarantees and show that it is also practical for real-world deployment. We also demonstrate that computational assumptions are necessary by showing a separation between information-theoretic DP and computational DP under our definition of verifiability.
In democratic societies including Iraq, electronic voting (e-voting) is an available option as a viable voting system. This system is more economically advisable than face-to-face voting by eliminating the need to pay poll staff. It may also make voting more accessible to the population with impairments and those living overseas. This study will propose an e-voting system based on smart contracts by using a decentralized private Blockchain. The proposed e-voting system will provide transparency, accuracy, fairness, eligibility, anonymity, verifiability, and immutability. This research proposed the most secure way of voting with the help of Blockchain using a mobile application that can be used to implement a large-scale solution and cost-effective. The Blockchain-based system has been designed in conjunction with the existing ECC cryptosystem to assure the dependability, anonymity, and security of votes and voters. The system that has been developed can be used to properly conduct elections, using a quick response code (QR Code), face recognition, and fingerprint for identification before casting a ballot to ensure eligibility. This results in using mobile smartphones in the voting process where voters can observe the transparency of their votes. Furthermore, eliminates the possibility of fraud and manipulation of the votes made due to the used blockchain for secure storage.
This paper presents the design, implementation, and verification of a blockchain-based online electronic voting system that ensures accuracy and reliability in electronic voting and its application to various types of voting using blockchain technologies, such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Specifically, in this study, the connection between the electronic voting system and blockchain nodes is simplified using the REST API design, and the voting opening and counting information is designed to store the latest values in the distributed ledger in JSON format, using a smart contract that cannot be falsified. The developed electronic voting system can provide blockchain authentication, secret voting, forgery prevention, ballot verification, and push notification functions, all of which are currently not supported in existing services. Furthermore, the developed system demonstrates excellence on all evaluation items, including 101 transactions per second (TPS) of blockchain online authentication, 57.6 TPS of secret voting services, 250 TPS of forgery prevention cases, 547 TPS of read transaction processing, and 149 TPS of write transaction processing, along with 100% ballot verification service, secret ballot authentication, and encryption accuracy. Functional and performance verifications were obtained through an external test certification agency in South Korea. Our design allows for blockchain authentication, non-forgery of ballot counting data, and secret voting through blockchain-based distributed ledger technology. In addition, we demonstrate how existing electronic voting systems can be easily converted to blockchain-based electronic voting systems by applying a blockchain-linked REST API. This study greatly contributes to enabling electronic voting using blockchain technology through cost reductions, information restoration, prevention of misrepresentation, and transparency enhancement for a variety of different forms of voting.
Security and privacy issues have become a major hindrance to the broad adoption of Ride-Hailing Services (RHSs). In this article, we introduce a new collusion attack initiated by the Ride-Hailing Service Provider (RHSP) and a driver that could easily link the real riders and their anonymous requests (credentials). Besides this attack, existing work requires heavy computations to execute user matching, and it is challenging for riders to verify matching results. Meanwhile, a malicious driver may cancel an assigned ride order due to its short distance. To address these issues, we present a RHS system named Nereus to support collusion resistance, efficiency, verifiability, and accountability. First, we integrate a smart contract into a Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave to establish aprivate smart contractfor collusion resistance. We use a Bloom filter to achieve efficient matching. Second, we leverage privacy-preserving range query and Merkle proofs to make matching results verifiable. Meanwhile, we adopt short group signatures to provide anonymous authentication and deposit commitments to hold the runaway driver accountable. We formally state and prove the security and privacy of Nereus. We build a prototype based on Ethereum and SGX to conduct extensive performance analysis in regard to gas costs, computational costs, and communication overhead. Experimental results show that Nereus significantly improves over existing schemes in terms of computational costs.
The Internet of Things is gaining more importance in the present era of Internet technology. It is considered as one of the most important technologies of everyday life. Moreover, IoT systems are ceaselessly growing with more and more devices. They are scalable, dynamic, and distributed, hence the origin of the crucial security requirements in IoT. One of the most challenging issues that the IoT community must handle recently is how to ensure an access control approach that manages the security requirements of such a system. Traditional access control technologies are not suitable for a large-scale and distributed network structure. Most of them are based on a centralized approach, where the use of a trusted third party (TTP) is obligatory. Furthermore, the emergence of blockchain technology has allowed researchers to come up with a solution for these security issues. This technology is highly used to record access control data. Additionally, it has great potential for managing access control requests. This paper proposed a blockchain-based access control taxonomy according to the access control nature: partially decentralized and fully decentralized. Furthermore, it presents an overview of blockchain-based access control solutions proposed in different IoT applications. Finally, the article analyzes the proposed works according to certain criteria that the authors deem important.
Voting stands as a cornerstone of democracy in any nation, empowering citizens to select future leaders and express their views within their communities. It fosters an understanding of civic duty and citizenship significance. Online voting systems, digital platforms designed to conduct elections securely, streamline the voting process by eliminating traditional paper ballots and in-person gatherings. These systems safeguard the integrity of each vote by preventing multiple submissions. Contrasting paper-based methods, electronic voting, or e-voting, offers inherent advantages such as heightened efficiency and reduced errors. Such systems promote broader participation by enabling individuals to vote from any location with internet access. Blockchain technology, an emerging decentralized innovation with robust cryptographic underpinnings, holds promise for enhancing various industries. Integrating e-voting with blockchain could address existing e-voting concerns. Here, we propose a blockchain-based voting system to curb fraud and enhance the simplicity, security, and efficiency of the voting process. Keywords: Blockchain, Ethereum, Smart-contracts, Online-voting, Privacy, Trust, Security
It has long been difficult to create a safe electronic voting system that provides the transparency and flexibility provided by electronic systems, while maintaining the fairness and privacy of present voting methods. Voting, especially during elections, is a technique where participants do not trust one another since the system might be attacked not just by an outsider but also by participants themselves (voters and organizers). The traditional methods of voting systems find it challenging to maintain the characteristics of an ideal voting system since there is a chance of tampering with results and disturbing the process itself. As a result, the effectiveness of the voting system is increased by translating the characteristics of an ideal voting system into digital space. It greatly lowers the expense of the elections and the work of the inspectors. In this essay, we'll use the open-source Blockchain technology to suggest a new electronic voting system's architecture. New chances to create new kinds of digital services are being provided by Blockchain. Numerous elements of our life have been altered by Blockchain technology, including the ability to save digital transactions via the Internet, confirm their legitimacy, license them, and provide the greatest level of security and encryption. This system offers a distributed architecture for storing the data, which distributes the data among many servers. In addition to maintaining voter identity outside of the vote count, this technology makes the voting process transparent.
The security of the tax system is directly related to the development of a country. The conventional process of tax payment laborious steps, so this process becomes a cause of irregularities among taxpayers and tax authorities, increasing the rate of corruption in tax collection. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, its unique advantages and promising applications in taxation offer an effective solution to the problems of electronic taxation. However, the transparency of blockchain exists the risk of privacy disclosure, the high degree of anonymity brings the problem of lack of user supervision. Therefore, for balancing the contradiction of taxpayer privacy and supervision, we propose a blockchain-based self-certified and anonymous e-taxing scheme, which uses blockchain as the underlying support, and utilizes cryptography technology such as self-certified public key, Diffie-Hellman, to reduce the taxpayer's reliance on the certificate authority, and protects the taxpayer's anonymity while realizing the tracking of the real identity of malicious taxpayers. The security analysis proves that the scheme has the properties such as anonymity, conditional privacy and unforgeability, etc. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared with similar schemes, the scheme significantly improves the registration efficiency, proving its practicability and implementability.
Ilya Grishkov, Roland Kromes, Thanassis Giannetsos, Kaitai Liang
This paper offers a prototype of a Hyperledger Fabric-IPFS based network architecture including a smart contract based encryption scheme that meant to improve the security of user's data that is being uploaded to the distributed ledger. A new extension to the self-encryption scheme was deployed by integrating data owner's identity into the encryption process. Such integration allows to permanently preserve ownership of the original file and link it to the person/entity who originally uploaded it. Moreover, self-encryption provides strong security guarantees that decryption of a file is computationally not feasible under the condition that the encrypted file and the key are safely stored.
Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam, Sajib Ahamed
Voting is a fundamental democratic activity. Many experts believe that paper balloting is the only appropriate method to ensure everyone’s right to vote. But this method is prone to errors and abuse. Many nations utilize digital voting methods to solve the difficulties of paper balloting. A single flaw in digital voting may lead to massive vote-rigging. Election voting methods must be legal, accurate, safe, and convenient. However, issues with digital voting methods may restrict acceptance. Due to its end-to-end verification capabilities, blockchain technology was developed to address these problems. To guarantee We have used blockchain technology anonymity, privacy, verifiability, mobility, integrity, security, and fairness in voting. By using blockchain our proposed system ensures security, privacy, and integrity. This system provides voter anonymity by keeping the voter information as a hash in the blockchain. It also provides fairness by keeping the casted vote encrypted till the ending time of the election. After ending time, the voter can verify their casted vote, ensuring verifiability. To test our protocol, we put it on Ethereum 2.0, a blockchain platform that uses Solidity as a programming language to create smart contracts. The adoption of smart contracts provides a safe means for performing voter verification, ensuring the correctness of voting results, making the counting system public, and protecting against fraudulent activities. We analyzed the system’s performance based on security and gas costs. It improves in terms of security characteristics and the related cost for the necessary infrastructure.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have increasingly been used in cybercrime and have become the key means of payment in darknet marketplaces, partly due to their alleged anonymity. Furthermore, the research attacking the anonymity of even those cryptocurrencies that claim to offer anonymity by design is growing and is being applied by law enforcement agencies in the fight against cybercrime. Their investigative measures require a certain degree of suspicion and it is unclear whether findings resulting from attacks on cryptocurrencies’ anonymity can indeed establish that required degree of suspicion. The reason for this is that these attacks are partly based upon uncertain assumptions which are often not properly addressed in the corresponding papers. To close this gap, we extract the assumptions in papers that are attacking Bitcoin, Monero and Zcash, major cryptocurrencies used in darknet markets which have also received the most attention from researchers. We develop a taxonomy to capture the different nature of those assumptions in order to help investigators to better assess whether the required degree of suspicion for specific investigative measures could be established. We found that assumptions based on user behaviour are in general the most unreliable and thus any findings of attacks based on them might not allow for intense investigative measures such as pre-trial detention. We hope to raise awareness of the problem so that in the future there will be fewer unlawful investigations based upon uncertain assumptions and thus fewer human rights violations.
Technological advancements in block chain (BC)-based frameworks have empowered scientists to create innovative inventions such as e-casting ballots. The traditional agreement models utilized proof-of-work (PoW) in the Bitcoin that affected energy utilization and bargained the adaptability for the ballot framework. The existing works evaluates the trust basically only on the centralized party as it was not feasible because of the dynamic changes in the pervasive social networking (PSN) topology and their characteristics. The present research work proposes a block chain based trust evaluation model for the PSN based BC. The proposed hybrid proof of stake-trust (PST) BC is based on the proof-of trust (PoT) and also the proof of stake (PoS) overcomes the issues that are occurring in the e-vote casting. The trust evaluation is performed for public verification and becomes transparent for each node of PSN. The advantage of the proposed method is that a new block will be designed for trust evaluation during the block generation. The process of sharding erases the workload when the network works fast for the individual nodes provides the sum of their alternative parts. Therefore, the model utilizes the agreements for generating the safe process that guarantee the precision to vote it from the time of the election results. The present research work utilizes the proof of stake-trust based BC resulted in security improvement. The model improves the adaptability and execution of the BC based on the ballot framework provided a secured voting system for the government. The proposed PST-BC model showed better results in terms of latency as 15/s when compared with the existing models merkle hash tree -bloom filter that obtained 107.3/s and performance constraints based electron of 18/s.
The paper presents the construction of a proof-of-concept for a distributed and decentralized e-voting application in an IoT embedded device with the help of blockchain technology. A SoC board was used as an IoT embedded device for testing the PoC. This solution ensures complete voter anonymity and end-to-end security for all entities participating in the electronic voting process. The paper outlines the solution’s two layers. Implementation details are presented for the e-voting application, which was deployed inside of an IoT embedded device. The solution and presented protocols provide two major properties: privacy and verifiability. To ensure privacy, the proposed solution protects the secrecy of each electronic vote. As for implementing verifiability, the solution prevents a corrupt authority from faking in any way the process of counting the votes. Both properties are achieved in the presented solution e-VoteD-App.
Buhari Ugbede Umar, Olayemi Mikail Olaniyi, Daniel Oluwaseun Olajide, Eustace M. Dogo
Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The futuristic fifth-generation cellular network (5G) not only supports high-speed internet, but must also connect a multitude of devices simultaneously without compromising network security. To ensure the security of the network, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol for mutually authenticating user equipment (UE), base stations, and the core network. However, it has been found that 5G-AKA is vulnerable to many attacks, including linkability attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To address these security issues and improve the robustness of the 5G network, in this paper, we introduce the Secure Blockchain-based Authentication and Key Agreement for 5G Networks (5GSBA). Using blockchain as a distributed database, our 5GSBA decentralizes authentication functions from a centralized server to all base stations. It can prevent single-point-of-failure and increase the difficulty of DDoS attacks. Moreover, to ensure the data in the blockchain cannot be used for device impersonation, our scheme employs the one-time secret hash function as the device secret key. Furthermore, our 5GSBA can protect device anonymity by mandating the encryption of device identities with Subscription Concealed Identifiers (SUCI). Linkability attacks are also prevented by deprecating the sequence number with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). We use Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the Scyther tool to formally verify our protocol. The security analysis shows that 5GSBA is superior to 5G-AKA in terms of perfect forward secrecy, device anonymity, and mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA). Additionally, it effectively deters linkability attacks, replay attacks, and most importantly, DoS and DDoS attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that 5GSBA is efficient for both UEs and base stations with reasonably low computational costs and energy consumption.
Gonzalo Munilla Garrido, Johannes Sedlmeir, Matthias Babel
Analyses that fulfill differential privacy provide plausible deniability to individuals while allowing analysts to extract insights from data. However, beyond an often acceptable accuracy tradeoff, these statistical disclosure techniques generally inhibit the verifiability of the provided information, as one cannot check the correctness of the participants' truthful information, the differentially private mechanism, or the unbiased random number generation. While related work has already discussed this opportunity, an efficient implementation with a precise bound on errors and corresponding proofs of the differential privacy property is so far missing. In this paper, we follow an approach based on zero-knowledge proofs~(ZKPs), in specific succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, as a verifiable computation technique to prove the correctness of a differentially private query output. In particular, we ensure the guarantees of differential privacy hold despite the limitations of ZKPs that operate on finite fields and have limited branching capabilities. We demonstrate that our approach has practical performance and discuss how practitioners could employ our primitives to verifiably query individuals' age from their digitally signed ID card in a differentially private manner.
Eman Ashraf, Nihal F. F. Areed, Hanaa Salem, Ehab H. Abdelhay · 5 authors
Recently, there has been considerable growth in the internet of things (IoT)-based healthcare applications; however, they suffer from a lack of intrusion detection systems (IDS). Leveraging recent technologies, such as machine learning (ML), edge computing, and blockchain, can provide suitable and strong security solutions for preserving the privacy of medical data. In this paper, FIDChain IDS is proposed using lightweight artificial neural networks (ANN) in a federated learning (FL) way to ensure healthcare data privacy preservation with the advances of blockchain technology that provides a distributed ledger for aggregating the local weights and then broadcasting the updated global weights after averaging, which prevents poisoning attacks and provides full transparency and immutability over the distributed system with negligible overhead. Applying the detection model at the edge protects the cloud if an attack happens, as it blocks the data from its gateway with smaller detection time and lesser computing and processing capacity as FL deals with smaller sets of data. The ANN and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models were evaluated using the BoT-IoT dataset. The results show that ANN models have higher accuracy and better performance with the heterogeneity of data in IoT devices, such as intensive care unit (ICU) in healthcare systems. Testing the FIDChain with different datasets (CSE-CIC-IDS2018, Bot Net IoT, and KDD Cup 99) reveals that the BoT-IoT dataset has the most stable and accurate results for testing IoT applications, such as those used in healthcare systems.
Abstract In recent years, With the rapid development of blockchain technol- ogy, there has been an increased interest in solving various opera- tional challenges. For the e-voting system at present, voter’s privacy, immutability of votes and third party dependency are major issues. These issues can very well be solved by blockchain technology. In this paper, we have proposed a decentralized framework for e-voting based on blockchain technology that contributes significantly to the implementation paradigm. We have implemented it on the Ethereum platform and developed a fully functional smart contract to store and validate votes. The research provides deep insight into the design of smart contract transactions in an e-voting system from a computa- tional cost perspective. In order to authenticate the voters, We have done voter verification in two phases. In the first phase, the voter reg- isters through a secure code, whose(code) Keccak-256 hash is stored on the blockchain, and in the second phase, the voter is verified by the managing authority. Based on the literature review, we found a lack of standardization for blockchain-based e-voting systems. So we have tried to fill this gap of standardization. In addition, we have also inspectedour model against various security attacks and found that our model is robust against double-spend attack, re-entrancy attack, DDoS etc.
Decentralized electronic voting solutions represent a promising advancement in electronic voting. One of the e-voting paradigms, the self-tallying scheme, offers strong protection of the voters' privacy while making the whole voting process verifiable. Decentralized smart contract platforms became interesting practical instantiation of the immutable bulletin board that this scheme requires to preserve its properties. Existing smart contract-based approaches employing the self-tallying scheme (such as OVN or BBB-Voting) are only suitable for a boardroom voting scenario due to their scalability limitation. The goal of our work is to build on existing solutions to achieve scalability without losing privacy guarantees and verifiability. We present SBvote, a blockchain-based self-tallying voting protocol that is scalable in the number of voters and therefore suitable for large-scale elections. The evaluation of our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the protocol's scalability is limited only by the underlying blockchain platform. We evaluated the scalability of SBvote on two public smart contract platforms -- Gnosis and Harmony. Despite the limitations imposed by the throughput of the blockchain platform, SBvote can accommodate elections with millions of voters.
Niki Hrovatin, Aleksandar Tošić, Michaël Mrissa, Branko Kavšek
Currently, the computational power present in the sensors forming a wireless sensor network (WSN) allows for implementing most of the data processing and analysis directly on the sensors in a decentralized way. This shift in paradigm introduces a shift in the privacy and security problems that need to be addressed. While a decentralized implementation avoids the single point of failure problem that typically applies to centralized approaches, it is subject to other threats, such as external monitoring, and new challenges, such as the complexity of providing decentralized implementations for data mining algorithms. In this paper, we present a solution for privacy-aware distributed data mining on wireless sensor networks. Our solution uses a permissioned blockchain to avoid a single point of failure in the system. Contracts are used to construct an onion-like structure encompassing the Hoeffding trees and a route. The onion-routed query conceals the network identity of the sensors from external adversaries, and obfuscates the actual computation to hide it from internally compromised nodes. We validate our solution on a use case related to an air quality-monitoring sensor network. We compare the quality of our model against traditional models to support the feasibility and viability of the solution.
Siddharth Singh, Rohit Prasad, Usha Dhankhar, Seema Malik
The revolutionary concept of blockchain has given a rise to multiple facets of secure, accountable, online services. We witness the rise of E-voting as a critical topic related to online services. Blockchain with smart contracts emerges as a good candidate to use in the development of safer, cheaper, more secure, more transparent, and easier to use e-voting systems. Ethereum and its network are one of the most viable candidates for the implementation of an e-voting system using blockchain, due to their consistency, widespread use, and provision of smart contracts logic. An e-voting system must be secure, as it should prevent duplication of votes while being fully transparent and protecting the privacy of the voters involved. In this work, we have implemented and tested a sample voting web - application as a smart contract for the Ethereum network using the Ethereum wallets and the Solidity language. Eventually, when elections are held, the Ethereum blockchain will store votes and voting results. Users can connect their Ethereum wallet and vote for the candidate they want to, and these transaction requests are processed by the consensus of each Ethereum node. These agreements create a transparent voting environment.
Maira Andrade, Steve Sharman, Leon Y. Xiao, Philip Newall
OBJECTIVE: Online gambling has increased the accessibility and range of gambling products available to people all over the world. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom. Cryptocurrency-based gambling is a new, largely unregulated, way to gamble online, which uses mostly anonymous blockchain-based technologies, such as Bitcoin. The present research investigated consumer protection features of 40 frequently visited and U.K.-accessible cryptocurrency-based online gambling operators. METHOD: A content analysis was performed by visiting all 40 cryptocurrency-based online operators and recording their safer gambling and consumer protection practices. Coded features included aspects of the sign-up process, features of any safer gambling pages, customer support practices, and Identity verification. RESULTS: Results revealed significant failings in the account registration process; none of the operators verified the identity of new users, and 35% required only an email or no personal information for sign-up. Overall, 37.5% of operators offered no safer gambling tools and a further 20% offered only one. Additionally, 64.7% of operators continued to email promotional material after being informed of a user's impaired control when gambling. Less than half of the analyzed operators held a valid license (47.5%), and none of the operators with an available deposit page required identity verification before enabling deposits. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the potential risks for young and vulnerable individuals, especially when a lack of identity verification is paired with the inherent anonymity of cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for greater policy and research attention toward cryptocurrency-based online gambling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques