Requirement Analysis of Some Blockchain-based E-voting Schemes

Year 2020, Volume: 9 Issue: 4, 188 - 212, 01.12.2020

Latif Anil Buyukbaskin Isa Sertkaya

Abstract

Today, developing technology is one of the most effective tools to make our lives easier. One of these developing technologies is blockchain that enables securely transferring digital assets between peers without requiring a trusted third party. In particular, blockchain poses new opportunities to effectively satisfy transparency, verifiability and anonymity for e-voting schemes. Based on recent proposals, it can be easily seen that applicability of blockchain technology for e-voting systems is actively researched. In this paper, we first summarized the set of e-voting requirements based on studies by Popoveniuc et al., Fujioka et al., Cranor et al., Benaloh et al., Juels et al. and etinkaya et al. In the light of these studies and requirement set, we analyzed recently proposed blockchain-based e-voting systems. As a result of these analyzes, one can determine that a mature blockchain based e-voting system that can meet all criteria has not been proposed yet. Particularly, we show that either the proposed schemes misses the basic requirements or does not fulfill these while claiming otherwise. Additionally, by simulating a large-scale election, we show that time complexity of e-voting schemes utilizing cryptocurrency blockchain such Bitcoin or Ethereum is impractical. Besides, we also emphasize new risks of utilizing public cryptocurrency blockchains for e-voting schemes. Accordingly, the readiness of blockchain-based e-voting has been discussed, from which it can be deduced that it would be more advantageous to research for e-voting specific blockchain technologies instead of utilizing existing cryptocurrency blockchains.

Keywords

Electronic voting, e-voting, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, security, privacy

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