Electronic voting systems face many challenges, including authentication, privacy, data integrity, transparency and verifiability. However, the developed over 10 years ago blockchain technology ...provides an out-of-the-box solution for many of those challenges. Despite that, some issues are still to be solved, like remote authentication, anonymity and end-to-end verifiability. For this reason, research on new and better blockchain-based systems is still ongoing. The main goal of this study is to highlight the current trends in this research and its eventual shortcomings. This was accomplished by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007), which resulted in selecting 35 publications. The performed SLR allowed to define trends in utilized blockchain technologies, intended scenarios, testing methods, main benefits and challenges faced by various systems and the most used cryptographic solutions.
Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers ...or open polling stations—voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election systems. On the other hand, the most often mentioned issues in blockchain applications are privacy protection and transaction speed. For a sustainable blockchain-based electronic voting system, the security of remote participation must be viable, and for scalability, transaction speed must be addressed. Due to these concerns, it was determined that the existing frameworks need to be improved to be utilized in voting systems.
Voting is one of the fundamental pillars of modern democracy. Continuous efforts have been made to strengthen the processes and methods involved to achieve verifiable, transparent voting systems. In ...recent years, blockchain has been increasingly used to address multi-dimensional challenges across widespread application domains including healthcare, finance and e-voting. However, achieving an efficient solution via use of blockchain requires consideration of a range of factors such as block generation rate, transaction speed, and block size which have a profound role in determining the overall performance of the solution. Current research into this aspect of blockchain is focused on Bitcoin with the objective to achieve comparable performance as of existing online payment systems such as VISA. However, there exists a gap in literature with respect to investigating performance constraints for wider application domains. In this paper, we present our efforts to address this gap by presenting a detailed study into performance and scalability constraints for an e-voting system. Specifically, we conducted rigorous experimentation with permissioned and permissionless blockchain settings across different scenarios with respect to voting population, block size, block generation rate and transaction speed. The experiments highlighted interesting observations with respect to the impact of these parameters on the overall efficiency and scalability of the e-voting model including trade-offs between different parameters as well as security and performance.
A smart city refers to an intelligent environment obtained by deploying all available resources and recent technologies in a coordinated and smart manner. Intelligent sensors (Internet of Things ...(IoT) devices) along with 5G technology working mutually are steadily becoming more pervasive and accomplish users' desires more effectively. Among a variety of IoT use cases, e-voting is a considerable application of IoT that relegates it to the next phase in the growth of technologies related to smart cities. In conventional applications, all the devices are often assumed to be cooperative and trusted. However, in practice, devices may be disrupted by the intruders to behave maliciously with the aim of degradation of the network services. Therefore, the privacy and security flaws in the e-voting systems in particular lead to a huge problem where intruders may perform a number of frauds for rigging the polls. Thus, the potential challenge is to distinguish the legitimate IoT devices from the malicious ones by computing their trust values through social optimizer in order to establish a legitimate communication environment. Further, in order to prevent from future modifications of data captured by smart devices, a Blockchain is maintained where blocks of all legitimate IoT devices are recorded. This article has introduced a secure and transparent e-voting mechanism through IoT devices using Blockchain technology with the aim of detecting and resolving the various threats caused by an intruder at various levels. Further, in order to validate the proposed mechanism, it is analyzed against various security parameters such as message alteration, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and authentication delay.
With the development of networking technology, it has become common to use various types of network services to replace physical ones. Among all such services, electronic voting is one example that ...tends to be popularized in many countries. However, due to certain concerns regarding information security, traditional paper voting mechanisms are still widely adopted in large-scale elections. This study utilizes blockchain technology to design a novel electronic voting mechanism. Relying on the transparency, decentralization, and verifiability of the blockchain, it becomes possible to remove the reliance on trusted third parties and also to enhance the level of trust of voters in the mechanism. Besides, the mechanism of blind signature with its complexity as difficult as solving an elliptic curve discrete logarithmic problem is adopted to strengthen the features related to the security of electronic voting. Last but not least, the mechanism of self-certification is incorporated to substitute the centralized certificate authority. Therefore, the voters can generate the public/private keys by themselves to mitigate the possible risks of impersonation by the certificate authority (i.e., a trusted third party). The BAN logic analysis and the investigation for several key security features are conducted to verify that such a design is sufficiently secure. Since it is expected to raise the level of trust of voters in electronic voting, extra costs for re-verifying the results due to distrust will therefore be reduced.
The study explores the Russian and international experience of using such forms of electronic voting in elections as with the help of a special device (complex) for electronic voting at a polling ...station (in a voting room, or another specially defined place), and remote electronic voting through a personal computer or a mobile device. The article analyzes the circumstances and conditions that contribute to the development and consolidation of electronic voting in the country's legislation, or, conversely, the conditions that lead to suspension or even rejecting electronic technologies from the electoral process at the state level. Up-to-date information on the use of electronic technologies in the elections has been examined. The stages, problems, and difficulties of introducing electronic voting technologies in elections, as well as directions for further improvement of electronic voting in countries that have chosen the path of long-term development of digitalization of the electoral process are highlighted. In the early 2000s, many countries of the world gained experience in the practical use of electronic technologies in elections. However, the scientific and technological achievements so far did not provide the necessary degree of voters' confidence in the security of the electronic voting system or any reliable result. The prejudice towards electronic voting technologies, as well as high-cost modern electronic systems for implementation, persist in many countries to this day. This is an objective obstacle to the widespread use of electronic technologies in the electoral process. At the same time, the experience of remote electronic voting in Russia and Estonia, the fragmentary inclusion of electronic voting in electoral procedures in a number of other countries, and the widespread use of electronic voting complexes show that electronic technologies in elections are already a reality.
Electronic voting is a prominent example of conflicting requirements in security protocols, as the triad of privacy, verifiability and usability is essential for their deployment in practice. ...Receipt-freeness is a particularly strong notion of privacy, stating that it should be preserved even if voters cooperate with the adversary. While there are impossibility results showing we cannot have receipt-freeness and verifiability at the same time, there are several protocols that aim to achieve both, based on carefully devised trust assumptions. To evaluate their security, we propose a general symbolic definition of election verifiability, extending the state of the art to capture the more complex structure of receipt-free protocols. We apply this definition to analyse, using ProVerif, recent protocols with promising practical features: BeleniosRF and several variants of Selene. Against BeleniosRF, we find several attacks showing that verifiability in Belenios does indeed suffer from the attempt to introduce receipt-freeness. On the other hand, Selene satisfies a weaker notion of receipt-freeness, but we show that it satisfies verifiability in stronger corruption scenarios. We introduce a general frame-work to compare the verifiability of these protocols in various corruption scenarios and conclude with an analysis of SeleneRF, an attempt to get the best of both that we formalise in this paper. In addition to extending the symbolic model, our results point to foundational gaps in current cryptographic models for election verifiability, as they fail to uncover attacks that we do.
Replay attacks are among the most well-known attacks against vote privacy. Many e-voting systems have been proven vulnerable to replay attacks, including systems like Helios that are used in real ...practical elections. Despite their popularity, it is commonly believed that replay attacks are inefficient but the actual threat that they pose to vote privacy has never been studied formally. Therefore, in this paper, we precisely analyze for the first time how efficient replay attacks really are. We study this question from commonly used and complementary perspectives on vote privacy, showing as an independent contribution that a simple extension of a popular game-based privacy definition corresponds to a strong entropy-based notion. Our results demonstrate that replay attacks can be devastating for a voter’s privacy even when an adversary’s resources are very limited. We illustrate our formal findings by applying them to a number of real-world elections, showing that a modest number of replays can result in significant privacy loss. Overall, our work reveals that, contrary to a common belief, replay attacks can be very efficient and must therefore be considered a serious threat.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The emergence of blockchain has ushered in a significant transformation in information systems research. Blockchain’s key pillars such as decentralization, immutability, and transparency have paved ...the path for extensive exploration in various research domains. This particular study is focused on electronic voting, aiming to improve voting procedures by making better use of the benefits offered by blockchain technology. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, we highlight the potential benefits of blockchain-based electronic voting systems such as transparency, security, and efficiency. However, several challenges, such as scalability, personal data confidentiality, and ensuring robust identity verification, persist. Addressing these issues is necessary to unlock the full potential of blockchain-based electronic voting systems, thereby fostering the development of trustworthy election systems in the future.
Electronic elections Alvarez, R. Michael
2010., 20100125, 2010, 2008, 2008-01-01, 20080101
eBook
Since the 2000 presidential election, the United States has been embroiled in debates about electronic voting. Critics say the new technologies invite tampering and fraud. Advocates say they enhance ...the accuracy of vote counts and make casting ballots easier--and ultimately foster greater political participation.Electronic Electionscuts through the media spin to assess the advantages and risks associated with different ways of casting ballots--and shows how e-voting can be the future of American democracy.
Elections by nature are fraught with risk. Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall fully examine the range of past methods and the new technologies that have been created to try to minimize risk and accurately reflect the will of voters. Drawing upon a wealth of new data on how different kinds of electronic voting machines have performed in recent elections nationwide, they evaluate the security issues that have been the subject of so much media attention, and examine the impacts the new computer-based solutions is having on voter participation. Alvarez and Hall explain why the benefits of e-voting can outweigh the challenges, and they argue that media coverage of the new technologies has emphasized their problems while virtually ignoring their enormous potential for empowering more citizens to vote. The authors also offer ways to improve voting technologies and to develop more effective means of implementing and evaluating these systems.
Electronic Electionsmakes a case for how e-voting can work in the United States, showing why making it work right is essential to the future vibrancy of the democratic process.
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