AMVchain: authority management mechanism on blockchain-based voting systems

As blockchain technology booms, modern electronic voting system leverages blockchain as underlying storage model to make the voting process more transparent, and guarantee immutability of data. However, the transparent characteristic may disclose sensitive information of candidate for all system users have the same right to their information. Besides that, the pseudo-anonymity of blockchain will lead to the disclosure of voters’ privacy and the third-parties such as registration institutions involved in voting process also have possibility of tampering data. To overcome these difficulties, we apply authority management mechanism into blockchain-based voting systems. In this paper, we put forward AMVchain, a fully decentralized and efficient blockchain-based voting system. AMVchain has a three-layer access control architecture, and on each layer, smart contracts are responsible for validation and granting permissions. Linkable ring signature is adopted in the process of voting to protect ballot-privacy. AMVchain also makes a tradeoff between efficiency and concurrency by introducing proxy nodes. The experiments results show that our system meets the basic requirements under the high concurrent users circumstance.