Self-Tallying Voting with Blockchain in Wireless Network Environment

Voting has been widely deployed in wireless networks for identifying suspicious nodes. However, a majority of voting protocols employed currently in wireless networks require a central party to tally the votes, which is subject to the issue of single point of failure. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a self-tallying voting system based on blockchain. While ensuring that the voting results are publicly verifiable, it avoids reliance on secure channels and trustworthy hardware. Specifically, our proposed framework uses smart contracts as an administrator to execute the business logic of the e-voting system, including voter authentication, vote casting, and ballot tallying. All communication does not require a trusted environment and can be deployed in conventional wireless networks. All the files and information are stored on the blockchain including the encrypted ballots and the tallying result, to guarantee the tamper-proof and transparency. We present two instantiations of the voting system, with one focusing on the fairness of the voters based on ElGamal-style encryption, and the other one achieving traceability event-oriented linkable group signatures. The proposed voting system is both trustworthy and efficient by taking advantage of the immutability and transparency of the blockchain. We show that both of the proposed voting systems can achieve security, transparency, public verifiability, cost-effectiveness, high scalability, and efficiency. We also implement and evaluate the proposed voting system to show the superior performance.