Online voting in academic institutions, businesses, and general elections is slowly becoming vogue. While it offers the advantage of voting remotely, saving the hassle of travel and instantaneous counting of votes, online voting poses a challenge when it comes to the security of data. Any leakage of data and subsequent tampering could create a lot of problems.

Cyber security solutions company Kaspersky says blockchain-based solutions can come to the rescue in such situations. Blockchain technology, which promises secure, block-by-block incorruptible transactions, is helping in building use cases for land records, banking transactions, and educational records.

Target server

Polys, a project from the Kaspersky Innovation Hub, has developed the prototype of a secure online voting platform, powered by blockchain technology. Targetted at businesses, universities, and political parties, the prototype of Polys Voting Machine lets all votes, cast at the designated polling stations or on personal digital devices, transmitted to the target server in a secure way.

“The Polys Voting Machine has been created to work on distributed ledger technology. All information related to votes is stored in a decentralised manner on several blockchain nodes,” said Roman Aleshkin, head of product at Polys.

The machine allows the voting organisers to store the data on several computers, making it difficult for hackers to break into them and tamper with the data. “To use one of the machines, voters would need to authenticate themselves with documents to prove their identity. Next, they would receive a unique QR code (or other token),” he said.

“Via this QR code, a person can also check on a special web application that his or her vote was registered in the blockchain, but their name and choice will not be stored in the blockchainto prevent tracing it to a specific individual,” he said.

To allow audits and recounts, a special Polys Printer can be connected to this distributed ledger, providing an accurate paper trail. The automatic count function significantly reduces staff and resource costs for organisers.

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