Coconut E-Petition Implementation
This work addresses privacy concerns for users in electronic voting systems, but it is incremental as it applies an existing cryptographic method to a specific application.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring privacy in electronic petitions by implementing a system based on the Coconut credential scheme, achieving unlinkability and anonymity so that no information about voters is leaked while verifying eligibility.
In this dissertation project, we describe and implement a practical system application based on a selective disclosure credential scheme, namely the Coconut credential scheme\cite{sonnino_coconut:_2018}. The specific application here is an electronic petition system with the distinctive added feature of unlinkability as well as anonymity: such that no information about the anonymous petition voter is linkable back to the individual. In other words, there is no data leaked about who voted in the petition, just that the users who did, were indeed eligible and authorized to vote. As for the implementation, the client-side is done using JavaScript so that the client can trustlessly compute the cryptographic constructions individually, whereas the server-side is done using Node.js, but can easily be replaced by a more sophisticated and secure structure such as a permissionless blockchain platform.