Abstract
Technology has positive impacts on many aspects of our social life. Designing a 24hour globally connected architecture enables ease of access to a variety of resources and services. Furthermore, technology like Internet has been a fertile ground for innovation and creativity. One of such disruptive innovation is blockchain -- a keystone of cryptocurrencies. The blockchain technology is presented as a game changer for many of the existing and emerging technologies/services. With its immutability property and decentralised architecture, it is taking centre stage in many services as an equalisation factor to the current parity between consumers and large corporations/governments. One of such potential applications of the blockchain is in e-voting schemes. The objective of such a scheme would be to provide a decentralised architecture to run and support a voting scheme that is open, fair and independently verifiable. In this paper, we propose potentially a new e-voting protocol that utilises the blockchain as a transparent ballot box. The protocol has been designed with adhering to the fundamental e-voting properties in mind as well as offering a degree of decentralisation and allowing for the voter to change/update their vote (within the permissible voting period). The paper highlights the pros and cons of using blockchain for such a proposal from practical point view in both development/deployment and usage contexts. Concluding the paper with a potential roadmap for blockchain technology to be able to support complex applications.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The 2018 IEEE Conference on Blockchain |
Publisher | IEEE Explore |
Pages | 1-7 |
Number of pages | 7 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-5386-7975-3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 3 Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
9 Pages, 6 Figures, 3 Tables, 5 Algorithms, ConferenceKeywords
- E-Voting
- Blockchain
- Privacy
- Security
- Ethereum
- protocols
- Public Key
- Computer architecture