journal article·2023-01-13Open access

Privacy-Preserving E-Voting System Supporting Score Voting Using Blockchain

Ali Alshehri, Mohamed Baza, Gautam Srivastava, Wahid Rajeh, Majed Alrowaily, Majed Almusali

Applied Sciences· Volume 13· Issue 2

Abstract

With the advancement of cyber threats, blockchain technology has evolved to have a significant role in providing secure and reliable decentralized applications. One of these applications is a remote voting system that allow voters to participate in elections remotely. This work proposes a privacy-preserving e-voting system supporting score voting using blockchain technology. The main challenge with score voting compared to the regular yes/no voting approach is that a voter is allowed to assign a score from a defined range for each candidate. To preserve privacy, votes shall be encrypted before submission to the Blockchain, however, a malicious voter can modify the score value before encrypting it to manipulate the elections result for the favor of a certain candidate. To address this challenge, the proposed scheme allows voters to first prove that the submitted score lies in the predefined range before the vote is added to the Blockchain to ensure fairness of the election. The performance of our scheme is evaluated against a set of comprehensive experiments designed to determine optimal bounds for workload and transaction send rates and measure the impact of exceeding these bounds on critical performance metrics. The results of these simulations and their implications therefore indicate that the proposed scheme is secure while being able to handle up to 10,000 transactions at a time.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Computer Science, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 71491, Saudi Arabia

Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424, USA

Department of Math and Computer Science, Brandon University, Brandon, MB R7A 6A9, Canada

Research Centre for Interneural Computing, China Medical University, Taichung 40402, Taiwan

Department of Computer Science and Math, Lebanese American University, Beirut 1102, Lebanon

Department of Information Technology, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 71491, Saudi Arabia

Funding

University of Tabuk

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