Blockchain-based anonymous and self-tallying voting with time-bounded ballot secrecy

Abstract

Voting has been indispensable in modern society, encompassing activities from national public elections to board decision-making processes, highlighting the extensive utility of voting protocols. In cyberspace, electronic voting serves as a foundational protocol for many applications, facilitating decision-making, task execution, trust establishment, consensus achievement, and data validation. However, existing voting protocols face security and privacy challenges, including anonymity and fairness. To address these issues, we propose a novel secure and privacy-preserving voting protocol atop blockchain. Our protocol achieves all-time voter anonymity and full fairness. Meanwhile, we take advantage of delay encryption to achieve time-bounded ballot secrecy. In addition, our protocol supports robust self-tallying and traceability. The security analysis, coupled with performance evaluation, affirms that our protocol fulfills all intended security properties while maintaining a reasonable level of overhead.