The smartphone voting will be a trial run in the US general election in November. As part of a new pilot project, West Virginia collaborated with the Boston-based technology startup Voatz to allow some military members stationed overseas to vote with devices connected to the blockchain voting record system.
Security experts have mixed reactions to the plan. Some people say that blockchain technology is not yet ready to perform important tasks such as voting security. But defenders said that as long as there are appropriate security measures, the pilot program will allow veterans stationed in remote areas to express their opinions during the midterm elections. Is the blockchain ready for the important moment?
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technical expert of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights organization, believes that smartphone voting has not yet been verified in this year's election.
He said: "I don't know why everyone's solution to things these days is to'wipe some blockchain on it.'" "Blockchain voting usually means that you vote online-this is a terrible bad thing. idea."
Hall predicts that the current encryption scheme will be broken in the next few years, which means that this year's secret ballot may end in the public domain in the future.
"Imagine if you are a uniformed soldier stationed abroad, excited about being able to vote using a remote blockchain voting system. Then imagine that after 20 years, the entire contents of your ballot will be decryptable And public. So starting 20 years ago, your vote may be ridiculed or backlashed in other forms."
Considering these risks, Hall urged caution. He pointed out that the voting process is not something that needs to be revised before conducting "serious and in-depth investigations and interrogations."
Benefits of blockchain votingOn the other hand, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner defended the pilot project. According to Warner's deputy chief of staff Mike Queen (Mike Queen), the retired Army officer failed to vote during deployment and he hopes to provide military personnel with better opportunities.
During a trip to Afghanistan, Queen pointed out that Warner did not have a telephone line or mailbox, which meant that he was cut off from voting in past elections. Many other soldiers face the same problem. According to data from the U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission, during the 2016 election, U.S. soldiers and other U.S. citizens residing abroad requested approximately 930,000 absentee ballots, of which 68.1% of the ballots were returned.
This is not the first smartphone and blockchain voting experiment in West Virginia. In the May primary election, a smaller pilot allowed veterans from two counties to vote on their smartphones, but as Queen pointed out, fewer than 20 veterans voted.
Officials don’t expect a large proportion of veterans to participate in the November trial. According to Queen, the November pilot project will allow overseas military personnel from approximately 15 counties in West Virginia to vote on smartphones.
How does the government deal with voting security challenges?Even so, the upcoming trial will use other security measures beyond the blockchain. Queen said the voting system will use two-factor authentication (2FA)-fingerprint and facial recognition-to identify and verify voters.
"We are not saying that blockchain is 100% foolproof," he said.
Some blockchain experts believe that the security of the voting system depends to a large extent on its ability to implement and identify the correct user of a given device. They believe that a properly established blockchain using multiple distributed nodes will make the voting system extremely difficult to compromise.
Andre McGregor, a partner of global investment consulting firm TLDR Capital and a former FBI network agent, said that with a strong blockchain, user authentication may be the most critical security measure. "It is exciting to see the use of blockchain in a very public and necessary environment, such as elections. We must realize that security compromises are almost always made by end users, or, in this case, Made by voters," McGregor said. "Blocking ballot malware is a real problem. The biometric compromise of a fake voter is even more worrying."
He said that a certified voter can also pass his or her mobile phone to others to vote. This "is equivalent to letting someone walk into the polling station in your name," McGregor added.
"Mobile voting can be easily handed over in an instant, which is likely to disrupt the voting process and may even put the candidate's victory into question."
However, even though some encrypted blockchains operate with thousands of nodes, Voatz will provide "up to 16 nodes" for voting trials. However, Voatz said the system is secure and its voting application is undergoing frequent and rigorous testing by independent security auditors.
Kyle Fournier, a cryptographic analyst at blockchain training provider CryptoManiaks, said that even a blockchain system with only 16 nodes is extremely difficult to compromise, as long as these nodes are set up securely. He said that the standard blockchain compromise scheme is called a 51% attack, because the attacker will have to take over more than half of the nodes in the system. It will be very difficult if the nodes are to be tested and verified according to the rules of the system.
Fournier explained: "If a 16-node blockchain is attacked by 51%, a bad participant needs to gain control of at least 9 nodes, provided that these nodes share equal responsibilities." "If used as a node The server has been actually verified, and I think 51% of the attacks should be infeasible."
What is the future of blockchain-based voting? Fournier said that he believes that blockchain-based voting has potential.
"Our current voting method is simply not good enough," he said. "Requires people to go to physical locations, resulting in low turnout. Hand count is very slow. Although our online process seems to open the door to hackers, hacking is already present in the way we work now."
However, blockchain expert and certified security expert Jeff Anderson (Jeff Anderson) said that it may be too early to use blockchain to vote on smartphones. He said that blockchain-based voting will require a lot of training to help voters ensure that their votes are recorded correctly.
Anderson added that when more people are comfortable with blockchain, the technology may be completed within five to ten years.
He said: "Blockchain is still an incredible early technology, and we want to make sure that voting takes place on a tested platform."
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