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Christian Palazzo edited this page Mar 15, 2024 · 31 revisions

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Welcome to the Agora wiki.

What is Agora

Agora is a e-voting platform based on a public Blockchain network and a Zero-Knowledge proof protocol. The purpose of this research project are:

  • To demonstrate how, using the zero-knowledge proof cryptography, it is possible to guarantee those indispensable conditions in a voting system such as privacy and secrecy of the vote even with an open, distributed and transparent technology such as a public blockchain;
  • To demostrate how electronic voting opens to new scenarios and voting mechanisms: as an example we want to develop a points voting system;
  • Enforce transparent governance to facilitate the adoption of democratic rules in regions where these are absent or in any case not very transparent;
  • Counteract the tendency towards abstentionism by regaining trust in the institutions;

Introduction

The most indispensable operations of a democracy are elections. Over the last few years there has been a progressive decline in voter turnout in Europe and Western countries in general. The causes of this phenomenon can be different and we will not investigate them here, but electronic voting could represent a change that would allow people to regain trust in institutions and elections.

Electronic voting allows operations to be carried out remotely but many concerns have been expressed about the fact that they can be manipulated. The latest algorithms guarantee privacy, anonymity and transparency of voting mechanisms, along with clear verifiability of the vote. Despite this, security incidents still occur and an electronic vote system that satisfies all the required characteristics has yet to be realized.

Blockchain technology and Dapps have high potential compared to electronic voting due to its characteristics of immutability, traceability and transparency. In recent years, many steps forward have also been made in terms of voting privacy and secrecy thanks to the implementation of zero-knowledge proof encryption.

This project still leaves many critical issues open such as:

  • the possibility of impersonation due to the difficulties in authenticating the voter;
  • scalability problems especially on a large amount of data;
  • the possibility of cyber attacks of various types;

Anyway one of the most important technical aspects that we want to investigate with Agora, is the possibility to introduce privacy and confidentiality transactions in a system, the blockchain technology, that is by its nature open, public and transparent. This possibility opens scenarios that go beyond the use case of blockchain technology explored in Agora, a governance system.

Privacy and Blockchain

Data privacy refers to protection of personal and sensitive information and the right of individuals to control how their personal information is collected, stored, used and shared. In the context of a digital election, the privacy element is vital, in order to protect individuals and the integrity and transparency of the voting mechanism.

However, in the blockchain context there is a lack of rigor in terms of privacy. To reach the required level of privacy required by a digital governance is an issue that needs to be addressed. There are different protocols that introduce privacy in the context of blockchain.

Privacy in blockchain can be divided into two main categories:

anonymity of the user; confidentiality of the transactions;

Anonymity is concerned with hiding the sender’s or receiver identity, confidentiality addresses the requirements of hiding transaction values.

Blockchain by their nature does not preserve privacy because of their mechanism of block approvals. All transaction data, including account details, inputs, outputs and states are visible to anyone on the blockchain and privacy can not be preserved. One solution is to encrypt the data but if the value is hidden the data cannot be verified. The need is to combine public verifiability and confidentiality.

Confidentiality can be divided into three categories:

conditional privacy: the system has the ability to make the data visible to a third party. unconditional privacy: generally speaking this can be dangerous in the context of a blockchain because it can permit criminal activities. Selective disclosure: Only some data is visible and the other data is hidden, this is the case of a voting system based on a blockchain, where we can make visible the person who voted, but not how they voted. Range proof allows to prove that a voter is more than 18 years old, but it does not reveal how the person voted. The transparency of blockchain transactions combined with network traffic analysis permits to reveal the IP address that made the transaction. This is a big problem from a privacy point of view. The different techniques available to provide a solution to anonymity and confidentiality can be divided into different categories:

layer 0: network layer methods, the mechanism operates at network level; layer 1: on-chain methods, the mechanism operates at at blockchain protocol; layer 2: off-chain methods, the mechanism operates outside the the main blockchain, but achieve privacy on the blockchain; Layer 0 solutions include the use of technologies like Tor Network and I2P. Tor: The Onion Router is a common choice to enable anonymous communications. I2P: Invisible Internet Project, is an anonymous network built on the internet. A third solution can be a silver bullet for privacy in the blockchain but it is not yet production ready: Indistinguishability Obfuscation, with this technique the inner mechanism of a smart contract is totally hidden. The technique consists in mixing the smart contract logic with random elements, making it computationally infeasible for an attacker to distinguish between two different program executions even if the attacker has complete access to the program code. Other techniques, not production ready are: homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computer, trusted hardware-assisted confidentiality. A possible technique that ensures total anonymity is the anonymous ring signature, where a group of signers sign each other the transaction but no one knows who is the signer. All the techniques mentioned above does not include the smart contracts, introduced in ethereum with the ERC-20 standard:

  • Zether: allow a private transaction that supports confidentiality and anonymity, it is implemented on the Ethereum blockchain.
  • Privacy using layer 2 protocols
  • Privacy managers
  • Privacy using zero-knowledge

Zero-Knowledge proof

The future of blockchain is going to be heavily oriented around the techniques reported above. The following papers illustrates the ZK proofs with Ethereum:

Zk-STARKS is an improvement of Zk-SNARKS, the original paper can be found here. A tool that implements a Zk-SNARKS on Ethereum is ZoKrates.

Donations

Agora is an open source project built with the effort of volunteers job. You can help this project by making a crypto donation here:

Wallet qr code

Works References

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