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Proba: Privacy-preserving, robust and accessible blockchain-powered Helios

cryptography
data-mining-and-machine-learning
security-and-privacy
software-engineering
blockchain

Abstract

The reliance on centralized trust remains a critical bottleneck for the widespread adoption of web-based voting systems like Helios. Although blockchain-based variants seek to address this, they bring forth new challenges. This paper presents PROBA, a redesigned blockchain-powered Helios voting system that enhances privacy, robustness, and accessibility. Helios, the first web-based and open-audit voting system, enables anyone to track the voting process, ensuring easy verifiability. However, the reliance on a centralized server has raised critical concerns regarding unauthorized data alteration and potential availability failures, thereby motivating the adoption of blockchain technology. This improvement renders the system decentralized, but challenges remain in maintaining reliability during the wallet authorization, preserving voters' privacy, and ensuring accessible transaction costs in the election. PROBA achieves these goals through the utilization of a novel threshold issuance-anonymous credential that mitigates misbehavior in wallet authorization and breaks the link between voters and their wallets. Additionally, PROBA leverages a consortium blockchain that provides cost-effective election solutions. The formal security of the proposed scheme is established through game-based reduction proofs across critical election requirements. Empirical performance analysis indicates that the integration of threshold issuance anonymous credentials imposes negligible computational overhead during the election phase, while simultaneously and effectively mitigating smart contract storage expenditures.
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