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A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10322))

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Abstract

We present the first implementation of a decentralised and self-tallying internet voting protocol with maximum voter privacy using the Blockchain. The Open Vote Network is suitable for boardroom elections and is written as a smart contract for Ethereum. Unlike previously proposed Blockchain e-voting protocols, this is the first implementation that does not rely on any trusted authority to compute the tally or to protect the voter’s privacy. Instead, the Open Vote Network is a self-tallying protocol, and each voter is in control of the privacy of their own vote such that it can only be breached by a full collusion involving all other voters. The execution of the protocol is enforced using the consensus mechanism that also secures the Ethereum blockchain. We tested the implementation on Ethereum’s official test network to demonstrate its feasibility. Also, we provide a financial and computational breakdown of its execution cost.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is also possible for voters that have not yet cast their vote to collude and compute the partial tally of the cast votes. For simplicity, we discuss a single voter in regards to the fairness issue.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/stonecoldpat/anonymousvoting.

  3. 3.

    We have included the code to create and verify the two types of zero knowledge proofs in the cryptography contract. The code is independent of the Open Vote Network and can be used by other smart contracts.

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Acknowledgements

The second and third authors are supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (No. 306994). We would like to thank Nick Johnson for taking the time to answer questions about Ethereum, Solidity and the test-framework Dapple. We thank Maryam Mehrnezhad and Ehsan Toreini for their support in this work during the Economist Case Study Challenge, Malte Möser for his comments on an early draft of the paper, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Patrick McCorry, Siamak F. Shahandashti & Feng Hao

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  1. Patrick McCorry
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  2. Siamak F. Shahandashti
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  3. Feng Hao
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Correspondence to Patrick McCorry .

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  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Aggelos Kiayias

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© 2017 International Financial Cryptography Association

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McCorry, P., Shahandashti, S.F., Hao, F. (2017). A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy. In: Kiayias, A. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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