A Decentralized Voting System
Typ
Examensarbete på kandidatnivå
Program
Publicerad
2019
Författare
Alshriaf, Abdullatif
Carlsson, Oscar
Lindau, Sarah
Lundqvist, Zack
Rudnick, Kevin
Waenerlund, Erik
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
The project A Decentralized Voting System aims to create a viable product
that would be a reasonable replacement for the current Swedish national voting
system. To that end, the scenario was always to investigate if contemporary
technology would suffice in realizing such a system.
VASSAL is presented as a decentralized voting system.
It utilizes the Ethereum network, a modern blockchain implementation, as a
decentralized database for storing votes, the electoral result and infrastructural
information needed to carry out the election.
One ambition for the project is to reduce the need for trusted third parties,
parties with greater capabilities than the voter. VASSAL relies on electoral
agencies for voter verification. However, utilizing blockchain technology our
implementation makes it possible for a sanctioned user to cast their vote onto
the blockchain directly.
Transparency is what makes blockchain technology powerful, as such it is of
utmost importance to find ways in ensuring that individual votes is only known
by its caster. The elliptic curve ElGamal encryption algorithm is used to keep
the cast votes secret and allowing an electoral agency to uncover the result. The
cryptographic protocol supports homomorphism, or the ability to do arithmetic
operations on ciphertext. A feature that if successfully used will keep votes
secret and yet enforce control mechanisms such as one voter - one vote. A
website was developed in order to visualize the product. Although this sound
revolutionizing, the Ethereum platform is not yet mature enough for voting and
the implementation of a protocol is a hard task when anonymity, transparency
and security all requires full attention.