Design And Implementation Of A Blockchain Based E-voting System

The blockchain concept has become a revolutionary model serving as the underlying technology behind bitcoins and other existing cryptocurrencies.Hence,it is without doubt that this important technology is triggering the beginning of a new phase in both the internet and online services.However,despite the fact that most people focus on utilizing the blockchain technology for cryptocurrencies through bitcoins,many administrative and financial procedures done online in the past can now be carried out on the internet as online services.Therefore,the introduction of ethereum smart contracts has made blockchain a powerful tool for digitalizing daily services i.e.the ethereum blockchain platform.Also,the underlying platform in which ethereum decentralized applications are built is the smart contract.This is comprised of codes that specify the rules and features needed to be carried out by the ethereum blockchain application.So,in this study,we will be using smart contracts to develop a blockchain based e-voting system suitable for different kinds of electoral processes.Although,developing an e-voting system which fulfills the legitimate requirements of the people is really challenging.With this,it is necessary to create a secured and transparent platform that meets the people'needs.However,some e-voting systems have been built in the past but most have been flawed with security and integrity issues.In our application,we will solve these issues and make sure that our system is secure and bug free.Alternatively,the blockchain is consist of distributed ledgers with history of previous transactions stored as a block,each with its own specific transaction hash.It also provides technological advancement to applications where security,decentralization and transparency is critical.Therefore,this study aims to combine both the blockchain and a secure database platform(firebase),This will provide a complete blockchain based e-voting platform that comprises voters'registration,authentication,vote casting and lastly counting of votes casted.Since the blockchain provides accessibility to all information stored on the network,the centralized platform needs to be utilized to prevent users5 private information from being accessible to anyone on the network.On this note,only the voting process,votes tallying and counting will be implemented on the blockchain.The system will enable decentralization and distribution of voting results to all participating nodes in real time.Furthermore,we introduced the blockchain concepts,frameworks and discussed briefly on few types of blockchain.Then,we described the designs and algorithms of our proposed system which addresses the limitations of the conventional e-voting system.Also,the DAO(Decentralized autonomous organization)attacks which has been a major problem with smart contracts will be discussed in our study.We will also highlight solutions as to how the DAO attack could be prevented.Finally,we implemented,executed and tested our ethereum smart contract with the features of our blockchain based voting system.The ethereum pseudo accounts on our local blockchain test framework,ganache,is used to model the operations of our blockchain platform.Likewise,the truffle environment is utilized in enabling interactions between our smart contracts and the local blockchain,while solidity is the programming language used in writing our smart contract.Our application experiments with results are presented in the chapter 5 of this study,which corresponds with the extensive research ideas i.e.reliability,transparency and security implemented in this work.