Blockchain-Based Secured Voting Using Multi-Level Authentication

Blockchain-Based Secured Voting Using Multi-Level Authentication

Megala G., Prabu Sevugan, Venkatesan R.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-9274-8.ch010
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Abstract

Although electronic voting has been used for many decades, electoral organizations are still adopting it. Despite technologies that preserve the secrecy, authenticity, and privacy of data, vote-rigging and privacy breaches remain a risk in e-voting systems. Blockchain is a distributed technology that underpins bitcoin. It appears to be a fit for digital election systems, as it provides a chance to keep data secret and prohibit data manipulation. But blockchain alone is not enough to address other concerns that come up during elections such as how to make sure that the person voting has the right to do so while keeping their identity disconnected from their vote. The user can safely vote from the three-levels of authentication: OTP, QR codeshare, and blockchain. Here, the system contains a secured timestamp and the hashcode which is used to identify attacks on the distributed server. These protected services provide secure vote casting and remedies for security issues. The legal limitations are also analyzed in the blockchain distributed ledger.
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Introduction

Block chain is a distributed transactional processing or distributed ledger and information management platform, originally designed for the Bit coin cryptocurrency. There has been a boom in interest in block chain technology since the notion was initially introduced in 2008. The essential qualities of Block chain is that it allow privacy, anonymity, and authenticity / integrity of information without the need of a trusted third-party authority for each transaction dependency, which opens up new study fields, particularly in terms of technological hurdles and constraints.

The three primary crucial elements to create a blockchain trust are (i) identity, (ii) possession and (iii) proof or verification.

  • 1.

    Identity - The introduction of digital signatures in block chains solves the identification problem. Each participant is assigned a pair digital key (private key, public key). A “private key,” which functions similarly to an account number, and a “public key,” which functions similarly to a password that they may use to simply prove their identity and conduct allowed transactions.

  • 2.

    Possession (Who holds or possess What) - Block chains use a technique called “cryptographic hashing” to tackle the possession challenge. A crypto hash is just an unit of information which has been turned into a smaller block of information by running it over a mathematical function. Each block in a block chain comprises a hashed version of the preceding block's content. Any changes you make to earlier bits of data will be reflected across the chain, making it easier for the system to spot and reject data manipulation attempts. This makes it possible to produce “immutable” information, sometimes termed as tamper-proof entries, using block chains.

  • 3.

    Proof or verification - Ultimately, block chains address the authentication issue by providing a group of individuals to publicly check the truthfulness of a transaction without the requirement for a trusted middleman. This is known as “consensus mechanism” in block chain jargon. A significant benefit of block chains is their capacity to validate transactions with fewer intermediates, which might yield to cheaper costs for many of the applications mentioned in this article.

Block chain is gradually gaining traction as a technology. Though various peer-to-peer apps for file transfers, streaming video, and other services have been existed for a long time, the premise that these networks could use their own safety and infrastructure has been in use since 2008. Block chain's success in the decade since its birth has been largely essential to the achievement of the mechanism that inspired it, bit coin. Many people are discovering that the fundamental value of block chain is its potential to improve existing systems. From the beginning, astute onlookers realised the technology's promise, as bit coin provided a more stable and trustworthy payment processing and financial service over previous options. Block chain has modernized a variety of sectors in recent years, notably online data storage, intelligent contracts, and fundraising events. The two main consensus processes used by cryptocurrencies to authenticate new transactions, append it towards the blockchain, and generate fresh tokens are proof of work and proof of stake. Mining is used to attain those aims through proof of work, which was initially pioneered by Bitcoin. Staking is used in Proof of Stake, which is used by Ethereum blockchain, and others to achieve the same goals.

The security team has seen electronic voting machines as problematic, inadequate, especially due to tangible security issues. Anyone with access privileges to that kind of machine has the ability to ruin it, impacting all votes cast on that device. This is where block chain technology comes in. A block chain is a public ledger that is distributed, unchanging, and indisputable. The primary elements of this innovative technology are as follows: (i) The ledger can be found in a variety of places: There is no single point of failure in the decentralised ledger's upkeep. (ii) The ability to append new transactions to the ledger is disseminated. (iii) Each and every suggested “new block” to the ledger should refer to the prior version of the ledger, forming an immutable chain from which the block chain originally comes and prohibiting manipulation with earlier entries' integrity.

The following are some of the blockchain difficulties that anyone considering adopting it should be aware of.

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