This paper investigates the strategic behavior of validators in blockchain systems utilizing the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism through the application of game theory. A mathematical model of a non-cooperative game with complete information is proposed, where validators act as rational agents aiming to maximize their expected payoff by choosing between honest validation and malicious actions, specifically a double-spending attack. The model incorporates key economic parameters of the system: block and attestation rewards, transaction fees, operational costs, slashing penalties, and the probability of detecting protocol violations. Utility functions for two primary strategies – honest and attacking – are formalized, and conditions for the existence of Nash equilibrium, the central solution concept in game theory, are analyzed. The analysis demonstrates that under effective punishment mechanisms, the "all-honest" equilibrium is stable: an individual validator has no incentive to deviate from protocol-compliant behavior, as potential losses from penalties significantly outweigh any gains from a failed attack. Conversely, the "all-attackers" equilibrium, while theoretically possible, is practically unattainable due to the prohibitively high cost of acquiring a majority stake, rendering such a strategy economically infeasible. A quantitative example based on a hypothetical network of 1000 validators confirms these findings and highlights the critical importance of balancing incentives for honest behavior with strong disincentives for malicious actions. The study emphasizes the crucial role of economic security in PoS systems, where stability is ensured not only by technical safeguards but also by carefully designed economic mechanisms. The developed model can be used by blockchain protocol designers to calibrate consensus parameters, thereby promoting decentralization, resilience, and long-term network reliability. Future research can extend the model by incorporating heterogeneous validators, repeated games, and the analysis of other attack vectors. Keywords: Proof-of-Stake, validators, game theory, Nash equilibrium, economic security, slashing, double-spending attack, game model, blockchain, consensus.
Venkatesh Babu R, Vignesh D, Sibaath Ahmed S, M P Ramkumar · 5 authors
The conventional messaging platform such as WhatsApp or Telegram is based on a centralized server, which fundamentally creates a gateway to censorship, surveillance, and points of failure. In essence, that is damaging to the user privacy and information security. In this paper, therefore, we develop and implement a Decentralized Chat Application (DCA) using Ethereum blockchain. Based on the fundamental capabilities of distributed ledger technologies, namely, immutability, transparency, and trustlessness, we are building a reliable, censorship-resistant chat service. The application operates under Ethereum Smart Contracts to handle decentralized user identities and to store public encryption keys safely as well as establishing chat channels. Our practical message content and media flows are stashed into an effective Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network, potentially stashed in off-chain storage such as Interplanetary File System(IPFS), but all messages are End-to-End Encrypted.The DCA model provides a good framework of the next-gen secure, private, and autonomous social interaction, as it leaves the end-users with complete ownership and control over their digital communication by abandoning the central authority.
Muruganantham Angamuthu, Mohammad Kanan, M Yasaswini, M. Silambaeasan · 6 authors
Voting by paper casts doubt on democratic processes due to security flaws, fraud, opaqueness, and limited verifiability. People want voting methods that are trustworthy and that withstand the digital revolution. This piece takes a look at a more effective voting mechanism that uses blockchain technology. By using the immutability, cryptographic resilience, and decentralization of DLT, this technology generates secure and verifiable elections. The foundation of a contemporary end-to-end voting system is digital identity management, cryptography that preserves anonymity, and mechanisms for reaching a consensus. Secure voting records are safeguarded from tampering and fraud by means of the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain. With the help of smart contracts, human error and manipulation may be eliminated from the voting process by completely automating voter verification, ballot validation, and vote tallying. While keeping voters’ identities secure, homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) confirm and monitor results. The security and efficiency of voter registration are enhanced by biometric identification verification and multi-factor authentication. Data collecting, voter verification, distributed validation, secure ballot casting, and open auditing of outcomes are all components of hierarchical design, as per the research. Hybrid blockchains combine public and permissioned ledgers to provide scalable and transparent election monitoring. Blockchain adoption is hindered by energy consumption, usability, and latency difficulties. These problems can be solved using efficient data structures and lightweight consensus algorithms.
Abstract: Remote electronic voting systems require tamper-evident records of ballot submissions, yet the ledger integrity problem - ensuring that the record cannot be silently altered after the fact - has received less formal treatment than ballot-phase cryptography. Existing approaches rely on distributed blockchain consensus, digital signatures on bulletin boards, or external hash-tree timestamping services, each introducing dependencies on specialized infrastructure, continuously trusted parties, or computationally intensive proof systems. This paper provides a formal security analysis of a hash-chained append-only ledger instantiated in a standard relational database with quorum replication, establishing that equivalent tamper-evidence guarantees are achievable under the sole assumption of collision resistance of the instantiated hash function. We define five security properties in the Bellare-Rogaway game-based framework. Tamper-evidence (Proposition 1) bounds any PPT adversary's advantage at 2q(λ) · Adv^CR_H, with a tight reduction to collision resistance. Fork-resistance (Proposition 2) establishes that an adversary corrupting fewer than a quorum threshold of replicas cannot cause divergent chain histories at honest replicas. Retrospective modification resistance (Proposition 3) establishes that post-close modifications are detectable by any auditor holding a real-time replica copy. Cross-ledger binding security (Proposition 4) extends these results to the dual-ledger construction of the Arcaunt architecture, in which a public ballot ledger and a temporal credential ledger are cryptographically bound at insert time, making modifications to either detectable through the other with advantage bounded by 4q(λ) · Adv^CR_H. Selector integrity (Proposition 5) establishes that the last-valid-vote rule - operating on insertion sequence rather than timestamps, making it immune to clock manipulation - is integrity-secure conditional on credential security, formally delineating the boundary between ledger and credential security domains. We apply an eight-metric comparative framework to seven e-voting integrity architectures - hash-chaining, bulletin boards, homomorphic tallying, mixnet-based systems, blockchain, KSI timestamping, and VVPAT hybrids - establishing three findings: tamper-evidence basis is universal but mechanism-specific; fork-resistance is architecturally necessary specifically for revoting-based systems; and auditability complexity is inversely correlated with cryptographic sophistication. The hash-chained relational ledger achieves collision-resistance-based tamper-evidence with O(n) verification accessible to any SQL-capable auditor - a design point unoccupied by existing systems under the same combination of properties. Prototype validation on a Firebird 5.0 implementation confirms that each proposition is instantiated by a specific database trigger mechanism, with 6ms mean ballot submission latency and O(n) verification complexity empirically confirmed.
Bitcoin is one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies. It offers decentralization, transparency, and Pseudonymity. However, this leads to money laundering, illegal activities, and financial scams. Malicious users also try to bypass transparency by using third party mixing services to conceal origins of users and due to the vast number of transactions it becomes difficult to detect the ownership of bitcoin wallets. To address these challenges, profiling ownership of the bitcoin addresses becomes necessary. The proposed research compares traditional clustering techniques with transaction pattern analysis to identify which wallet addresses belong to which entities. Gini Impurity measure is used to evaluate how accurately the clusters are developed to detect ownership. Uncovering the relationship between these addresses is necessary to understand the behavior of users. This helps in identifying suspicious activities in the bitcoin network by mapping relations between the wallet addresses. This could aid in Anti-money laundering as a tool for crypto-forensics.
Mobile communication channels have become a major target for large-scale and adaptive fraud, including impersonation, phishing, and unsolicited calls. Existing caller-verification frameworks depend on centralized heuristics and static credentials that fail to reflect behavioral trust or protect users in real time. This paper presents BTID (Behavioral Trust for Identity Decentralization) - a decentralized, privacy-preserving identity framework that derives caller reputation from verified behavioral feedback. BTID integrates Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) with a lightweight zero-knowledge-proof mechanism, enabling callers to prove that their behavioral reputation meets a callee's trust threshold without revealing their actual score or personal data. Each post-call rating is recorded as a cryptographic commitment and aggregated through a pairwise Sybil-resistant reputation model governed by exponential decay (λ = 0.0039, six-month half-life). A reference prototype demonstrates that the protocol is implementable and logically sound even under high-cost and high-latency conditions on public ledgers. On modern lightweight networks such as Algorand or IOTA, the same architecture can achieve sub-second verification and near-zero cost. Beyond its technical contribution, BTID also reframes the role of the blockchain itself. Rather than treating decentralization as an ideological end, this work demonstrates that a tamper-proof and privacy-preserving public ledger can serve as a shared, universal database accessible to all participants and not as a silo controlled by industrial conglomerates. In doing so, BTID shows that the blockchain can function as a neutral trust infrastructure capable of addressing a real and universal problem in mobile communication: establishing behavioral trust without sacrificing privacy.
The integrity of democratic voting systems is increasingly threatened by security vulnerabilities, lack of transparency, and trust deficits, making electoral processes susceptible to manipulation. To address these concerns, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) introduces a blockchain-powered voting framework that leverages the Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus protocol to enhance security and decentralization. To further fortify the system, ResNet-101, a deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN), is integrated for facial recognition authentication, ensuring voter legitimacy and eliminating identity fraud. Additionally, one-time password (OTP) authentication and live location tracking strengthen the system against unauthorized access and proxy voting. By combining blockchain technology, biometric verification, and AI-driven facial authentication, BSC establishes a highly secure, transparent, and tamper-proof voting system. This approach aims to restore public trust in electoral processes, setting a new benchmark for secure and verifiable digital voting systems in democratic governance.
Voting is a critical process in any democratic country, but traditional methods like ballot papers and Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) face several issues. These include a lack of transparency, low voter turnout, vote tampering, mistrust in the election process, voter ID forgery, delays in announcing results, and major security concerns. When it comes to digital voting, ensuring security is one of the biggest challenges, as the system must be capable of protecting data and preventing cyber-attacks. Blockchain technology offers a potential solution to these problems. It is a decentralized system that allows transactions to take place in a secure, peer-to-peer network. Blockchain key feature search as immutability, decentralization, security, transparency, and anonymity make it a strong option for developing secure and reliable e-voting systems. By using smart contracts, blockchain can further enhance the security and transparency of digital voting. This paper presents a sample e-voting application implemented as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain using Solidity. The system uses wallets with limited tokens (gas) that are consumed during voting, ensuring that each voter can only vote once. The paper also discusses the pros and cons of blockchainbased voting and demonstrates a basic web application to show its functionality and limitations.
Alinsha S, A Althaf, Chris P Reji, Fahad Mohammed A · 6 authors
Electronic voting techniques have gained popularity as a contemporary alternative to traditional paper-based elections because of their effectiveness and accessibility. The current electronic voting methods, however, have significant security flaws, such as multiple voting, identity theft, centralized control, and a lack of transparency. Despite the fact that blockchain technology is decentralized, immutable, and auditable, many blockchainbased voting systems merely employ cryptographic credentials and lack robust voter identification verification processes. The blockchain-based electronic voting system SecureVote, which incorporates multi-factor verification and facial biometric authentication, is proposed in this study. Ethereum smart contracts are used by the system to guarantee transparent result calculation and tamper-proof vote storage. SecureVote employs one-time password (OTP) validation as a secondary authentication method in conjunction with client-side facial recognition and deep learning-based feature extraction. The suggested design makes use of Web3.js and a decentralized application (DApp) concept for safe wallet-based transaction signing and blockchain interaction. High authentication reliability, avoidance of double voting, and effective transaction processing with low gas overhead are all demonstrated by the experimental results. SecureVote combines biometric multifactor authentication with blockchain immutability to enhance the reliability, transparency, and integrity of remote voting.
Open access
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Electronic voting systems require satisfaction of security, transparency, and voter privacy to ensure fair and trustworthy election processes. Traditional centralized voting architectures suffer from limitations such as single points of failure, limited auditability, and vulnerability to data manipulation. This paper proposes a secure and decentralized electronic voting framework based on block chain technology to address these challenges. The proposed system integrates cryptographic authentication, role-based access control, smart contract automation, and distributed ledger storage to ensure tamper-resistant vote recording and transparent election management. The architecture employs a hybrid design combining secure database management for authentication with block chain-based transaction storage for immutable vote recording. Smart contracts enforce election rules, including voter eligibility verification, single-vote constraints, and automated vote tallying. Off-chain storage mechanisms are incorporated to improve scalability while maintaining data integrity by cryptographic hashing. Comprehensive testing, including unit, functional, integration, performance, and security evaluations, demonstrates reliable system operation and successful prevention of unauthorized access and duplicate voting attempts. Experimental results confirm that proposed framework provides secure vote handling, transparency, and auditability while preserving voter anonymity. The proposed approach offers a practical and scalable solution for next-generation decentralized electronic voting systems.
The integrity and scalability of electoral processes within large-scale academic institutions are often compromised by centralized vulnerabilities and high computational overhead. This paper proposes a novel, hierarchical consortium blockchain framework designed for Indian university ecosystem to facilitate secure, transparent, and high-concurrency e-voting. By utilizing tiered architecture comprising establishment-level private sidechains and global university-wide Ethereum ledger, proposed system optimizes trade-off between voter anonymity and transactional throughput by integrating Linkable Ring Signatures and Zero- Knowledge Proofs to ensure the Secret Ballot principle while maintaining public auditability. Experimental evaluations on with N = 4000 participants demonstrate an average gas consumption of 15,580 units per voter and peak throughput of 181 TPS. Experimental results reveal 11.5% reduction in per-voter processing latency compared to state-of-the-art models, showing proposed framework efficacy for high-density academic environments.
S. Senthilkumar, M Alex Pandian, B Linu Harish, V Harish
Blockchain has recently attracted significant attention, particularly for its potential to address major issues in traditional electronic voting such as limited transparency, centralized control, and vulnerability to tampering. In this research, it aimed to design and evaluate a blockchain-based electronic voting system that ensures voter privacy, increases transparency, and can efficiently manage large-scale elections. The proposed system adopts a modular, layered architecture featuring secure voter registration, authenticated vote casting, automated tallying, and public auditing. It operates on a permissioned blockchain, with smart contracts enforcing the necessary rules and validations. To maintain security, the system incorporates public-key encryption, cryptographic hashing, zero-knowledge proofs, and threshold cryptography. This combination guarantees ballot confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation for voters. For consensus, the system utilizes Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). To evaluate performance, the conducted simulations that measured transaction latency, voting throughput, and scalability as participation increased. The findings revealed low latency, consistent throughput, and strong scalability, making the system suitable for both national-scale elections and smaller voting scenarios. In comparison to conventional e-voting platforms, this blockchain-based approach eliminates single points of failure, significantly reduces the risk of vote manipulation, and enables transparent auditing of the election process.
Abdul Kalam Aasath J, Ajay Kumar K, A. Sathiyaraj, Mary Gladence L
This paper introduces a Zero-Trust, provably secure electronic voting protocol that overcomes the long-standing trilemma of security, privacy, and end-toend verifiability by combining advanced cryptographic mechanisms with multimodal biometric authentication. Electronic voting promises improved accessibility and efficiency, yet traditional systems depend heavily on centralized trusted authorities, leaving them vulnerable to insider threats, coercion, and large-scale manipulation. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, the proposed framework employs deep-learning-based facial and fingerprint recognition with liveness detection to prevent identity spoofing at the edge. Voter privacy and coercion resistance are ensured through a Nullifiable Commitment Scheme integrated with Paillier Homomorphic Encryption, enabling vote tallying directly over encrypted ballots without exposing vote contents. Additionally, the system introduces a novel Homomorphic Encrypted Anomaly Detection (HE-AD) module capable of identifying malicious traffic patterns on ciphertext features with an accuracy of 98.2%, thereby enabling real-time threat monitoring without compromising confidentiality. All encrypted ballots, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and audit logs are recorded on a permissioned blockchain to guarantee Verifiability of Cast as Intended and Recorded as Cast. Experimental results confirm that the system achieves an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.85% in biometric verification and maintains an average transaction latency below 2.5 seconds, demonstrating its feasibility for national-scale elections in high-assurance environments.
D. Victor Abhishek, Y. Meena Kumari, G Surekha, B. Sai Hemanth Reddy
Web3 authentication has become a key to the decentralized applications and allows users to sign in using cryptographic wallet signatures rather than centralized credentials. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that the current Web3 authentication systems are very susceptible to message-based attacks especially Blind Message Attacks, which takes advantage of unclear message semantics, lack of domain binding, insecurity with nonce, and lack of verification on the server side. This paper critically examines those vulnerabilities based on realworld deployments of Web3 authentication and shows that a large percentage of extant implementations can be compromised by an attacker. In order to handle such issues, we present a configurable and deployable authentication model, the socalled Secure Web3 Authentication Framework (SWAF), that implements structured authentication messages, high message equality checking, nonce management in context-sensitive fashion, and protocol-level domain binding. The suggested scheme is tested on a real-world set of 29 Web3 authentication examples, in which it perfectly mitigates Blind Message Attacks, Replay Attacks, Blind Multi-Message Attacks, as well as, cross-domain authentication abuses keeping its computational overhead at only a small fraction. Our findings indicate that looking at protocol-level authentication semantics strictly is feasible and necessary to enhancing confidence and security in Web3 authentication schemes.
Kenneth Richard Dike, Ugbari Augustine, Martha Ozohu Musa
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.
Traditional paper-based voting system for student organization leaders election has issues related to security, transparency, and trust. This research addressed these issues by implementing a blockchain on e-voting system utilizing smart contracts to ensure the security and transparency of the voting process. The system was developed using the agile software development life cycle (SDLC) methodology and was tested using black-box and system usability scale (SUS) method to evaluate its functionality and usability. Security testing was conducted through unit testing on the smart contract and block verification within the Sepolia network. The results showed that the decentralized e-voting system could prevent vote manipulation and detecting duplicate voters, as evidenced by the unit testing of the smart contract, which confirmed that recorded votes could not be manipulated and attempts to submit multiple votes were detected and rejected. Meanwhile, system transparency was demonstrated through direct verification using a block explorer, showing that the entire voting process and the smart contract code were publicly accessible and transparent. The system was successfully simulated on a small scale within a student organization, and usability testing using the SUS method was conducted with 30 respondents. The test resulted in a score of 72 points, indicating that the system was in the good category and was well accepted by users. Therefore, the decentralized approach in this e-voting system has been proven to enhance transparency and overcome the problems of security issues in the voting process.
Allu Venkata Sai, N. Purushotham, Sanapureddy Pallavi, Telugu Akula Nanda Sai · 6 authors
This paper presents a structured review of secure, cloud ready, multi tenant blockchain voting systems with an emphasis on privacy guarantees, deterministic finality, and end to end verifiability. We synthesize advances in consensus PoS BFT hybrids privacy preserving cryptography commtments, nullifiers, and zero knowledge proofs and operational isolation for multi tenant deployments. We analyz threat models spanning malicious voters, operators, and partialy Byzantine validator sets, and summarize design patterns that reduce manipulation risk while retaining auditabilty. The review highlights open challenges in coercion resistance, scalable proof systems, and governance. We conclude with a design checklist and research directions for practical, verifiable e voting at institutional scale.
Attiq Ur Rehman, Shuai Lü, Muhammad Usman, Zaheer Ahmad Gondal · 7 authors
Abstract The integration of Cloud computing with the Internet of Things (IoT) has greatly increased the scale and complexity of sharing data in Cloud-based Internet of Things (CIoT) environments. However, this growth brings challenges with regard to security of sensitive data, privacy, access control management, and accountability. In this paper, we propose Block-chain Enabled Secure and Anonymous Data Sharing (BS-ADS), which is a framework that tries to overcome these challenges by combining Aggregate Key Searchable Encryption (AKSE) and blockchain-based auditing, edge-assisted revocation and accountable anonymity. BS-ADS eliminates the need for centralized trust by using blockchain to store encrypted metadata such as ciphertext hash and revocation identifier. This provides trust and transparency which are decentralized without revealing plaintext data. The frame-work includes the support of linkable ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs to maintain user privacy while allowing for traceability and therefore allowing for the detection of malicious behavior to take place without the need of the loss of anonymity. Furthermore, edge nodes are responsible for the encryption up-dates in case of revocation, and they remove the computational load from the resource-constrained IoT devices. The performance of BS-ADS was evaluated in terms of encryption overhead, ciphertext size, and the communication cost. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of BS-ADS in terms of encryption overhead, which reduces the encryption overhead by 30–40%, while guaranteeing efficient keyword-based search and data retrieval. Additionally, it offers a 20–30% reduction in communication overhead in multi-user scenarios, maintaining constant communication cost per operation (O(1)). The system is also proven secure against selective chosen-ciphertext attacks (SIND-CCA), replay attacks, Sybil attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. This work introduces a novel architecture for secure, scalable, and accountable data sharing in CIoT, incorporating efficient revocation mechanisms and privacy-preserving search. BS-ADS provides significant improvements in efficiency, security, and privacy, offering a promising solution for large-scale CIoT applications.
In democratic systems, secure and transparent voting mechanisms are essential to maintain public trust and electoral integrity. Traditional paper-based and centralized electronic voting systems often face challenges such as limited transparency, risk of data manipulation, and dependence on centralized authorities. To address these issues, this project proposes a decentralized blockchain-based voting system designed to enhance security, transparency, and reliability. The system is developed on the Ethereum blockchain, where each vote is recorded as an immutable transaction to prevent tampering or duplication. Smart contracts written in Solidity automate essential election functions including voter registration, vote validation, and result computation. A web-based interface built using React.js and Web3.js enables secure interaction with the blockchain, while wallet-based authentication ensures that each authorized user can cast only one vote The system is implemented and tested in a controlled environment to evaluate performance, accuracy, and resistance to double voting.
Zibin Lin, Taotao Wang, Shengli Zhang, Long Shi · 6 authors
Web 3.0 platforms need an onboarding mechanism that can admit real users at scale without forcing them to reveal identity documents or pay one on-chain verification cost per user. Existing approaches typically rely on KYC-style disclosure, per-request on-chain verification, or trusted batching, making onboarding cost and latency difficult to predict under bursty demand. We present \textbf{ZK-AMS}, a credibly anonymous admission infrastructure that maps Personhood Credentials to anonymous on-chain Soul Accounts. Rather than introducing a new primitive, ZK-AMS composes zero-knowledge credential validation, permissionless batch submission, recursive proof aggregation, and anonymous post-admission account provisioning into one end-to-end workflow. Its key design feature is a confidential batching pipeline in which admission instances of a common relation are folded off-chain under multi-key homomorphic encryption, allowing an untrusted batch submitter to coordinate aggregation without direct access to individual user witnesses during batching; the confidentiality scope is characterized explicitly in the security analysis. The resulting batch is settled on-chain with constant verification cost per batch rather than per admitted user. We implement ZK-AMS on an Ethereum testbed and evaluate admission throughput, end-to-end latency, gas consumption, and parameter trade-offs. Results show stable batch-verification gas across evaluated batch sizes, substantially lower amortized on-chain cost than the non-recursive baseline, and practical cost-latency trade-offs for high-concurrency onboarding in Web 3.0 platforms.
Disha Pardeshi, Sujata Sathe, Viha Bakshi, Ananya Mary Sebastian
AbstractThe growing need for secure and transparent electoral systems highlights the challenges faced by Non-Resident Indian (NRI) voters. Current rules requiring physical presence at polling stations limit participation, despite rising registrations. In our proposed blockchain-based voting framework, votes are transmitted through a secure virtual private network (VPN) and authenticated at the Election Commission of India (ECI) gateway node. After authentication, the votes are verified across multiple blockchain nodes using a consensus mechanism. Once validation is completed, the votes are permanently recorded in the distributed ledger, ensuring that they cannot be altered or removed. Smart contracts are employed to automate the vote-counting process, reducing manual intervention and minimizing the possibility of human error. The final election results are then made available through the ECI dashboard, enabling transparency and easy verification by authorized stakeholders.The proposed framework aims to improve accessibility for Non-Resident Indian (NRI) voters by enabling secure remote participation while preserving voter anonymity. By strengthening trust in the electoral system and encouraging wider participation, the solution supports improved electoral integrity. Overall, the integration of blockchain technology into the voting process contributes toward building a more transparent, secure, and inclusive democratic system in India.Keywords: Blockchain, NRI Voting, Distributed Ledger, Electoral Integrity, Consensus Mechanism, Immutability, Voter Anonymity.
This paper reviews 40 studies on blockchain-based e-voting proposals, specifically focusing on authentication and related trade-offs. A data-based examination of the evidence showed that password-based mechanisms, although popular, detected only 85% of the attacks. In contrast, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) have a detection rate of 99% but only a completion rate of 72% for usability, implying that security and usability are strongly inversely correlated (r=-0.67). For instance, hybrid approaches such as ZKPs with biometrics or Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) with multi-factor authentication are considered secure (96%-99%) but not very user-friendly (80%-85%). Homomorphic encryption and other technologies have been cited as privacy aids in the literature. In addition, technical design alone cannot overcome the deep-seated sociopolitical challenges of enduring digital divides and citizen mistrust, which are slow to change within large populations, or regulatory dissonance between local and national systems, as illustrated in the cases of Estonia's i-Voting and an aborted Swiss pilot. "The trade-off between security, privacy, usability, and cost is always fluid. More integrated and effective interdisciplinarity is needed to ensure that important issues for social and political life, such as democratic legitimacy, are adequately addressed in post-quantum cryptography and artificial intelligence research. Planning prophylactic measures is necessary in the context of emerging threats from quantum computing and AI-produced deepfakes. While there are alternatives to post-quantum cryptographic ciphers, these incur computational overhead. Therefore, making e-voting secure will rely not only on new technology but also on understanding the social and political effects of that technology, being aware of how it might be put into practice, and focusing on a design that meets the needs of all voters.