Polys voting system migrates from Ethereum to Exonum

Polys, a blockchain system for remote voting, migrated from the Ethereum protocol to Bitfury’s Exonum framework. ForkLog reported this, citing Kaspersky Lab.

According to the developers, the main advantage of the new blockchain is its high transaction throughput, making the system suitable for large-scale voting.

“The maximum we were able to achieve from the Ethereum client Parity is 300 transactions per second. The Exonum blockchain, thanks to its own consensus algorithm, can process up to 5000 transactions per second with a half-second latency and has the potential to increase performance,” they noted.

Another problem with Ethereum is the unlimited amount of gas available to network participants:

“At certain stages, users interact with the system anonymously, and we cannot configure the issuance of the strictly necessary amount of gas to prevent sending an unlimited number of transactions. In addition, adding user smart contracts to the network creates additional load and can be used for malicious manipulation”.

Polys on Ethereum used the Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithm, which carried a significant drawback for voting: to prevent the appearance of an alternative chain, the status of a transaction had to be verified across several blocks. Verification slowed down throughput.

“Increasing performance will allow Polys to implement elliptic-curve cryptography. By default, the decryption key is stored with the organizer of the vote, but Polys can share it among several entities using a key-splitting application or a distributed key-generation mechanism,” — said the developers.

Voter anonymity is now guaranteed by blind-signature technology not tied to personal data:

“Previously we used a technology based on homomorphic encryption — votes were aggregated in encrypted form and only their sum was decrypted. Blind signatures are a more reliable anonymity mechanism, as they mathematically guarantee an impossibility to link a voter’s identity with their choice”.

The Exonum framework protects results from falsification by generating cryptographic proofs — only the voter can verify how their vote was counted at every stage of the voting.

The updated architecture is written in Rust and does not require the use of virtual machines. This simplifies the transition from international cryptographic standards to Russia’s ГОСТ and enables customizing the smart-contract logic to broaden the system’s functionality.

“Developers can implement new methods of voter authentication and introduce additional ballot formats, for example, in the case of a referendum to decide on several issues,” noted Polys project lead Alexander Sazonov.

The old Ethereum-based version of the solution, with all the votes created there, will be available at old.polys.me.

The Polys blockchain used for voting at the Russian Football Union’s annual conference.

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