A Practical Anonymous Voting Scheme Based on Blockchain for Internet of Energy

Abstract

E-voting allows us to build a democratic business in most Internet of things (IoT) systems. For example, we may vote to choose a proper energy broker in a smart grid system. In this study, we focus on e-voting services in an Internet of energy (IoE) system, which is a new-style smart grid. A practical e-voting in IoE may focus on the properties of fairness, decentralization, eligibility, anonymity, compatibility, verifiability, and coercion resistance. It is difficult to fulfil all these properties simultaneously. Traditional voting schemes often use a public bulletin board or administrator in the voting process, which makes them become centralized. Services that offer e-voting via blockchain can make the voting schemes decentralized. However, many of them ignore the complexity of organizing the data of the transactions, which should be confirmed by the miners. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no works have tested the performance in the blockchain while considering practical use cases and constraints. Concerning all the challenges, we propose a practical anonymous voting scheme for IoE called IoEPAV. The proposed scheme fulfils all the mentioned design goals simultaneously. We tested IoEPAV both in different test networks of the Ethereum blockchain to give an overall evaluation. The practical evaluation can show that the proposed scheme is easy to be integrated into a real system like IoE. We also gave a comparison analysis with the state-of-the-art blockchain-based e-voting. All the results show that IoEPAV is decentralized, verifiable, anonymous, and highly efficient.