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Blockchain centered Homomorphic Encryption:
A solution for E-balloting
First A. Author, Fellow, IEEE, Second B. Author, and Third C. Author, Jr., Member, IEEE
 voter is given the opportunity to generate signature for his
Abstract—There is a big question arising in the today’s
world of increased technology. If we can bank online and
shop online, why we can’t vote online? Experts say, there
is no way to guarantee that the security, privacy, and
transparency requirements for elections can all be met
with any practical technology in the foreseeable future.
The attacks available for online voting are also available in
online banking and online shopping. But why it is more
dangerous because, due to attacks in online voting system,
a wrong individual may be selected or some correct votes
can be rejected. The technical security, privacy, and
transparency requirements for voting are structurally
different from e-commerce and are actually much more
stringent than those for e-commerce transactions. In
particular, the voting security and privacy requirements
are unique and in tension in a way that has no analog in
the e-commerce world. In this paper, a secure online
voting system is implemented using Elliptic Curve
Cryptosystem for encryption of votes and Homomorphic
Encryption for tallying the results. Blockchain is the
trending security measure. So we use Blockchain to store
the encrypted ballots.
Index Terms— Blockchain, Homomorphic Encryption,
ElGamal ECC, E-Balloting, Online voting
I. INTRODUCTION
The secure voting system is designed such that people can
open the website and cast their vote at any place and anytime
they want and also ensuring confidentiality of votes and
verification of integrity and validity of election results.
A. ELGAMAL WITH ECC
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a public-key
cryptography system which is based on discrete logarithms
structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. In ECC is used for
authentication, key exchange and encryption of messages. ECC
uses an elliptic curve over a finite field (P) of the form,
y 2 = x3 + ax + b (mod P)
Elliptic ElGamal is less expensive in computation compared
with AES and RSA. In RSA we need to generate a large prime
number and in private key cryptosystems like AES and DES,
many rounds of computation is need to generate key and for
encryption. Hackers have already found a way to extract key
in DES. Hence ECC was found to be advantageous. Also the
votes so that verifier can verify whether the vote has been
received from authorized voter.
B. HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows
computation on cipher texts, generating an encrypted result
which, when decrypted, matches the result of the operations as if
they had been performed on the plaintext. The purpose of
homomorphic encryption is to allow computation on encrypted
data. Homomorphic encryption can be used to securely chain
together different services without exposing sensitive data. In this
paper, Partial Homomorphism is being used. The additive
property of ElGamal ECC is used for tallying the individual
ballots without decrypting the ballots individually.
C. BLOCK CHAIN
By the definition of Blockchain, ”The Blockchain is an
incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be
programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually
everything of value.” By storing data across its network, the
Blockchain eliminates the risks that come with data being held
centrally. Here Blockchain is used to store the encrypted ballots
so that no person can modify the ballot before tallying phase.
II. RELATED WORK
In the paper [1], each vote is encrypted using ElGamal
cryptosystem. To satisfy additive homomorphic property they
use exponential ElGamal cryptosystem. The system depends
upon honesty of authorities. At least one of the authority is
required to be honest. The paper [2] suggests the enhanced
version of the standard ElGamal encryption scheme which
supports multiplicative homomorphism and resists more the
confidentiality attacks. Generator of the multiplicative group
is secured. Confidentiality of outsourced data into third party
is ensured. No efficient algorithm can recover private key. It is
semantically secured. It loses main property of standard
ElGamal algorithms such as confidentiality of key exchange
and digital signature. The paper [3] suggests a Secure Privacy
Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme (SPPDA) which utilizes
the homomorphic property of the bilinear ElGamal
cryptosystem to perform privacy preserving secure
computations and combine it with aggregate signature scheme,
enabling data authenticity, integrity in wireless Body Area
Network. The homomorphic aggregation scheme proposed is
more complex. Computation overhead is observed. The paper
[4] presents an optimized realization of an elliptic curve based
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additive homomorphic encryption to be used in the TinyPEDS
framework in WSN. The main optimization techniques
employed are pseudo-Mersenne prime reduction on the finite
field level and the Interleave method and the signed MOF
representation for the point multiplication. The paper [5]
discusses the recording of voting result using Blockchain
algorithm from every place of election. By adopting
Blockchain in the distribution of databases on e-voting
systems can reduce one of the cheating sources of database
manipulation. The use of hash values makes this system more
secure and the use of digital signature more reliable.
Each authority has a protected directory to store his public and
private key. No authority is accessible to another authority’s
directory.
2) Voter Authentication and Authorization:
The voter who wants to participate in the election, must
enroll them-selves by submitting their Voter ID and other ID
proofs like Aadhaar card, etc., Once the Voter ID is verified, a
unique reference key is generated and sent to the voter which
can be used to login into the voting system at the time of
election.

3) Key Generation of Authorities and Voters:

III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
The overall architecture of an online voting system involves:
Initialization, Registration, Voting, Tallying and
Announcement of results. Security must be included in these
phases so that the vote casted by the right voter is not ignored
and the right candidate is as the result of the election.
The entities involved in this system are five authorities,
candidates (Max. of 64), voters and a Public bulletin board. In
this voting system, five authorities are required. Each having a
pair of public key and private key. All the authorities together
generate a public key called the Cumulative Public Key
(CPK). We assume that at least one authority should be
honest. Candidates can register them by giving their names 1
month prior the election. Our system can support up to 64
candidates. Voters can enroll themselves prior the election by
submitting their Voter ID card and other proofs like Aadhaar
card. The authority validates the voter with the Voters List
Database and registers the voter for election. The Public
Bulletin Board is a secured broadcast channel that is visible to
all the entities as well as outsiders. The authority posts the
CPK in the Public Bulletin Board.
Before the election starts, the five authorities must generate a
pair of public and private keys (APK, ASK). These keys are
stored in the respective directory of the authorities. Then all
the authorities broadcast their public keys to compute the
Cumulative Public Key (CPK). This CPK is published in the
Public Bulletin Board. This is the key generation phase of the
authorities. Once the election begins, the authenticated voters
generate a pair of public and private keys (VPK, VSK). The
key generation follows the ElGamal Key Generation scheme.
The algorithm for Key Generation is,
Algorithm 1: Key Generation of Elliptic ElGamal system
Input: A random number X
Output: Public Key and Secret Key Pair (PK, SK)
Initialization;
1) Select a number X such that 0<X<P-2
2) Compute Y such that Y = X.P (ECC product)
3) Return Y and X as PK and SK respectively.
4) Encrypted Vote Casting:
Each Voter after authentication and key generation selects one

Candidate from the list of candidates. The selected candidate

B. MODULAR DECOMPOSTION OF THE Figure 1. Overall Architecture
PROPOSED is encrypted using the CPK from the PBB and the voters own
METHODOLOGY secret key (VSK). The cipher texts are C1, C2. Here the cipher
This online voting system divided into six modules. They texts in the form of coordinates on the elliptic curve.
Encryption of the message m is done by, selection of a point
are,
Pm on the elliptic curve. P m is encrypted using the CPK of the
1) Combined Authority Authentication: authorities and secret key of the voter. The exponentiation in
The system consists of five Authorities. Each authority has ElGamal is replaced by ECC multiplication and multiplication
a unique Authority ID. He is authenticated to the system using in ElGamal is replaced by ECC addition. ECC addition and
One Time Pad which is sent to their mobile phone or e-mail. ECC multiplication is computationally expensive. But here we
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use small prime number. Hence, reducing the overhead of the
computation. The voter needs to generate signature for the
vote castes which will be verified by the authority to ensure
that the vote has been from authorized voter. While verifying
the signature the authority cannot decrypt the vote of
particular voter. He can only verify whether the vote has been
casted by authorized voter or not. The algorithm for
encryption of vote is given.
Algorithm 2 Encryption of Vote Mi by Voter Vi
Input: Generator (G), Voter’s Secret Key (R), CPK, Vote M
Output: C1,C2 (cipher texts)
Initialization;
1) Compute C1 = ECC.MUL(G,R)
2) Compute T = ECC.MUL(CPK,R)
3) Compute C2 = ECC.ADD(M,T)
4) Return C1,C2
5) Vote Authentication using DSA
The signatures sent by the voters while casting the votes are
verified by a random authority. He verifies whether the vote is
casted by authorized voter or not. If the verification is found to
be false then the vote is assumed to be a false vote and it is
ignored. If the vote is verified to be true then the vote is
accounted for tallying purpose. The authority also verifies
whether he particular voter has casted only one vote. If
multiple votes are detected then the vote is ignored.
with ECC which is more secured compared to other
cryptography and is also relatively less computation. In this
paper the additive homomorphic property of ECC is used for
computation of results and Blockchain for storing the
encrypted ballots.
V. REFERENCES
[1] X. Yang, X. Yi, S. Nepal, A. Kelarev and F. Han, "A
Secure Verifiable Ranked Choice Online Voting System
Based on Homomorphic Encryption," in IEEE Access, vol.
6, pp. 20506-20519, 2018.
[2] K. El Makkaoui, A. Beni-Hssane and A. Ezzati, "Cloud-
ElGamal: An efficient homomorphic encryption
scheme," 2016 International Conference on Wireless
Networks and Mobile Communications (WINCOM), Fez,
2016, pp. 63-66.
[3] A. Ara, M. Al-Rodhaan, Y. Tian and A. Al-Dhelaan, "A
Secure Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme Based
on Bilinear ElGamal Cryptosystem for Remote Health
Monitoring Systems," in IEEE Access, vol. 5, pp. 12601-
12617, 2017.
[4] R. Hanifatunnisa and B. Rahardjo, "Blockchain based e-
voting recording system design," 2017 11th International
Conference on Telecommunication Systems Services and
Applications (TSSA), Lombok, 2017, pp. 1-6.
[5] Fu Minfeng and Chen Wei, "Elliptic curve cryptosystem
ElGamal encryption and transmission scheme," 2010
International Conference on Computer Application and
System Modeling (ICCASM 2010), Taiyuan, 2010, pp. V6-
51-V6-53.

Algorithm 3 Digital Signature Verification

Input: Generator (G), Voter’s Public Key (Y), S1, S2, Hash
(H), Order (N)
Output: True / False
Initialization;

1. Compute W = INVERSE(S2,N)
2. Compute V1 = H * W (mod N)
3. Compute V2 = S1 *W (mod N)
4. Compute T1 = ECC.MUL(G,V1)
5. Compute T2 = ECC.MUL(Y,V2)
6. Compute V = ECC.ADD(T1,T2)
7. IF V(mod N) == S1 THEN return
8. ELSE return false

6) Homomorphic Decryption for result computation

We use Homomorphic property of Elliptic ElGamal for
computing the results. ElGamal exhibits Partial
Homomorphism. Instead of decrypting each ballots
individually, the ballots are add and by decrypted using the
additive property of Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the results
are revealed. The voters can verify the results by checking the
Public Bulletin Board and verify whether their vote has been
modified or not.
IV. CONCLUSION
Thus we design a secure online voting system using block
chain. In this paper, the encryption algorithm used is ElGamal