학술논문

FASTEN: Fair and Secure Distributed Voting Using Smart Contracts
Document Type
Conference
Source
2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC) Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), 2021 IEEE International Conference on. :1-3 May, 2021
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Conferences
Smart contracts
Blockchain
Privacy breach
Cryptocurrency
Cost benefit analysis
Electronic voting
Distributed Trust
Smart Contracts
Ethereum
Language
Abstract
Electing democratic representatives via voting has been a common mechanism since the 17 th century. However, these mechanisms raise concerns about fairness, privacy, vote concealment, fair calculations of tally, and proxies voting on their behalf for the voters. Ballot voting, and in recent times, electronic voting via electronic voting machines (EVMs) improves fairness by relying on centralized trust. Homomorphic encryption-based voting protocols also assure fairness but cannot scale to large scale elections such as presidential elections. In this paper, we leverage the blockchain technology of distributing trust to propose a smart contract-based protocol, namely, FASTEN. There are many existing protocols for voting using smart contracts. We observe that these either are not scalable or leak the vote tally during the voting stage, i.e., do not provide vote concealment. In contrast, we show that FASTEN preserves voter’s privacy ensures vote concealment, immutability, and avoids double voting. We prove that the probability of privacy breaches is negligibly small. Further, our cost analysis of executing FASTEN over Ethereum is comparable to most of the existing cost of elections.