S3Voting: A Blockchain Sharding Based E-Voting Approach With Security and Scalability

Electronic voting plays a crucial role in facilitating democratic and convenient decision-making in people’s lives. However, implementing an electronic voting system poses challenges, such as meeting the stringent security requirements for anonymity, fairness, and verifiability. Another concern is the performance degradation when dealing with a large number of voters. In this paper, we propose <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>Voting, a blockchain sharding-based e-voting scheme that addresses these challenges. By combining robust security and scalability, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>Voting provides reliable technical support for conducting large-scale elections. Utilizing advanced technologies such as <i>Homomorphic Time-Lock Puzzle (HTLP)</i> and <i>one-time ring signature</i>, the system safeguards voters’ privacy and ballot confidentiality. The approach involves dividing voters and miners into smaller shards, and implementing shard managing mechanisms to ensure security and enhance system efficiency. Through thorough security analysis, we demonstrate that <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>Voting not only meets the fundamental security requirements of e-voting but also offers verifiability and strong robustness-essential elements for successful large-scale elections. Moreover, experimental results indicate that <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S^{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula>Voting significantly reduces the computational burden on individual miners and minimizes system processing time compared to existing blockchain-based e-voting solutions.