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DABSTERS in e-voting satisfies the following secu-
rity properties. Eligibility: Only registered voters
can vote, and nobody can submit more votes than al-
lowed. Fairness: No preliminary results that could
influence other voters’ decisions are made available.
Robustness: The protocol can tolerate misbehaving
voters. Integrity: Is the assurance of the accuracy
and consistency of votes. Individual Verifiability:
Each voter can check whether his vote was counted
correctly. Universal Verifiability: Anybody can ver-
ify that the announced result corresponds to the sum
of all votes. Vote-Privacy: The votes are kept pri-
vate. This can also be modeled as an unlinkability
between the voter and his vote. Receipt-Freeness:
A voter cannot generate a receipt to prove to a third
party which candidate has voted for.
Related Work: We study various voting systems
based on Blockchain technology and we resume their
security properties in Table 1.
Open Vote Network (McCorry et al., 2017): It is a
self-tallying, boardroom scale e-voting protocol im-
plemented as a smart contract in Ethereum. Open
Vote Network ensures votes privacy since votes are
encrypted before being cast. This protocol is self tal-
lying so it is universally verifiable and ensures indi-
vidual verifiability thanks to the use of Blockchain.
However, it suffers from several security issues. For
example, it supports only elections with two options
(yes or no) and with a maximum of 50 voters due to
the mathematical tools that they used and to the gas
limit for blocks imposed by Ethereum. Additionally,
this protocol does not provide any mechanism to en-
sure coercion resistance and needs to trust the elec-
tion administrator to ensure voter’s eligibility. Open
Vote Network is not resistant to the misbehavior of
a dishonest miners who can invalidate the election by
modifying voters’ transactions before storing them on
blocks. A dishonest voter can also invalidate the elec-
tion by sending an invalid vote.
TIVI (Smartmatic, 2016): It is an online voting
solution based on biometric authentication, designed
by the company Smartmatic. It checks the elector’s
identity via a selfie using facial recognition technol-
ogy. TIVI ensures several security properties such as
voters’ eligibility since it provides different authen-
tication techniques and votes secrecy so long as the
encryption remains uncompromised. It provides also
voters’ privacy thanks to its mixing phase and offers
the possibility to follow votes by the mean of a QR
code stored during voting phase and checked later via
a smartphone application. However, this system does
not provide any mechanism to protect voters from
coercion or to ensure receipt-freeness. Additionally,
TIVI uses the Ethereum Blockchain as a ballot box
so it is not resistant to misbehaving miners that could
invalidate the election by modifying votes before stor-
ing them on the election Blockchain.
Follow My Vote (Followmyvote, 2012): It is
an online voting protocol that uses the Ethereum
Blockchain as a ballot box. A trusted authority au-
thenticates eligible voters and provides them with
pass-phrases needed in case of changing their votes
in the future. Voters can watch the election progress
in real time as votes are cast. Follow My Vote re-
spects a limited number of security properties. It in-
cludes an authentication phase which ensures voters’
eligibility. It allows voters to locate their votes, and
check that they are both present and correct using
their voters’ IDs. Nevertheless, this voting system re-
quires a trusted authority to ensure votes confidential-
ity and hide the correspondence between the voters’
real identities and their voting keys. If this authority is
corrupted, votes are no longer anonymous. Votes se-
crecy is not verified because votes are cast without be-
ing encrypted. Moreover, the ability to change votes,
coupled with the ability to observe the election in real
time compromise fairness property. This system is not
coercion resistance, a coercer can force a voter to vote
in a certain way and check his submission later using
his pass-phrase. FMV is not universally verifiable be-
cause there is no way to verify that the votes present
in the election final result are cast by eligible voters.
Verify-Your-Vote: a Verifiable Blockchain-based
Online Voting Protocol (Chaieb et al., 2018): It is an
online electronic voting protocol that uses Ethereum
Blockchain as a bulletin board. It is based on a variety
of cryptographic primitives, namely Elliptic Curve
Cryptography, pairings and Identity Based Encryp-
tion.
The combination of security properties in this pro-
tocol has numerous advantages. As shown in Table 1,
it ensures voter’s privacy because the Blockchain is
characterized by the anonymity of its transactions. It
also ensures fairness, individual and universal veri-
fiability thanks to the ballot structure that includes
counter-values and to the homomorphism property of
pairings. However, VYV suffers from acknowledged
weaknesses where the honesty of human being is in-
volved especially in the registration phase and the ar-
chitecture of the system. A first problem is that the
registration phase is centralized. A unique authority,
which is the registration agent, is responsible for ver-
ifying the eligibility of voters and registering them. A
dishonest agent can register persons who do not have
the right to vote. Thus, ineligible voters, who are pro-
vided by valid authentication parameters, can access
the Blockchain and participate in the election. A sec-
ond problem is inherent in the use of Ethereum be-
DABSTERS: Distributed Authorities using Blind Signature to Effect Robust Security in e-Voting
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