Electronic voting through blockchain: A proposed framework

• Autor(a) principal: Castro, Antonio Lorenzo Rezende de
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30592
• topic: Blockchain; Framework -- Framework; E-voting; Sistemas distribuídos -- Distributed systems

Voting has been a prevalent matter in modern history, and since democracy has been the go-to system for governing nations the interest from malicious actors to disrupt an election has been notorious. Multiple countries have been exploring electronic voting as of Brazil, Australia, and Pakistan. With the development of blockchain technology and it’s immutable and transparent nature there has been multiple studies exploring the use of blockchain technology for voting systems and exploring its flexibility and challenges with maintaining voters’ privacy. This work is composed of two main parts. Firstly, a Systematic Literature Review on the current State of the Art research for blockchain voting systems, exploring solutions and reviews, and categorizing and identifying multiple points in the taxonomy of these solutions. Secondly the Design Science Research (DSR) was chosen to build the artefact, in this case a blockchain voting solution. Multiple versions of the solution were developed with increased complexity and technologies. Exploring the paradigm of the currently available blockchain solutions and new and upcoming cryptographic developments. With each iteration, an evaluation of aspects such as Privacy, Scalability and security were done to identify needed improvements. It was identified that currently used blockchain technology such as Ethereum and other Layer 2 Solutions still lacks the scalability or privacy. That said the exploration of Zero-Knowledge Proof Cryptography and developing roll ups for Ethereum that use Zero-Knowledge Virtual machined Showed a significant development in voters’ privacy, scalability, and decentralization, although this technology is not yet ready to be used in production.