Electronic Ballot Issuance With Blind Multi-Signatures
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing blockchain-based electronic voting systems face challenges in ensuring voter eligibility while maintaining anonymity and preventing tampering, with linkable ring signatures being inefficient for large-scale elections and blind signatures relying on a central authority that can introduce vulnerabilities.
Innovation Solution
A biased blind multi-signature scheme is implemented, where each candidate signs each voter's blinded public key, reducing the number of required signatures linearly and ensuring eligibility by requiring collusion among candidates to tamper with votes, while utilizing blockchain for immutability and auditability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If linkable ring signatures are used to confirm voter eligibility, then election integrity is improved by preventing forged ballots, but computational efficiency deteriorates quadratically with the number of voters
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the verification process by introducing intermediate authorities (election commissioners, candidates) that divide the computational burden. Instead of one verifier checking all signatures, the work is distributed across multiple independent parties, each verifying a subset of signatures locally before combining results on blockchain.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces intermediary authorities (election commissioners and candidates) who act as mediators between voters and the final vote count. These intermediaries perform local verification of signatures and only submit verified votes to the blockchain, reducing the overall computational load on the distributed ledger.
2Loss of information
If blind signatures are used to maintain voter anonymity, then voter privacy is improved, but system security deteriorates due to reliance on a central authority that can introduce forged ballots
Solution Approach 1:
The blind signature function is segmented across multiple independent authorities (election commissioners and candidates) rather than relying on a single central authority. Each authority adds a layer of cryptographic verification, distributing trust and preventing any single point of failure or corruption.
Solution Approach 2:
The system merges multiple signature schemes into a multi-signature protocol where votes must be signed by both election commissioners and candidates. This combination of signatures from multiple independent parties creates a stronger security guarantee than a single blind signature, as all parties must collude to forge a vote.
3Difficulty of detecting and measuring
If all actions of eligibility are made public through linkable ring signatures, then auditability is improved, but computational resources are consumed quadratically
Solution Approach 1:
The audit trail is segmented into local verification records kept by intermediate authorities and a condensed summary stored on blockchain. Each authority maintains local evidence of verification, while the blockchain stores only the essential vote data and cryptographic proofs, reducing overall storage and computational requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
The system moves verification from a single-dimension blockchain storage model to a multi-dimensional architecture where verification occurs locally at multiple levels (voter, commissioner, candidate, auditor) with only essential data stored on-chain. This dimensional shift allows comprehensive auditing without quadratic computational costs.
Data Source
AI summary
A voting system has a voter key pair including a voter private key and a voter public key. The voter public key is blinded. A plurality of candidate key pairs is generated. Each candidate key pair includes a candidate private key and a candidate public key. The blinded voter public key is signed with each of the plurality of candidate private keys or a subset of the plurality of candidate private keys to create a plurality of blinded signatures. The plurality of blinded signatures is unblinded to generate a plurality of unblinded signatures valid for the voter public key. A vote is cast using the voter public key and the plurality of unblinded signatures.