Proverum: A Hybrid Public Verifiability and Decentralized Identity Management
This work addresses the critical need for secure and verifiable voting systems in democracies, particularly for federalistic states, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and identity management technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring trust in electoral processes by proposing Proverum, a hybrid approach that combines private permissioned distributed ledgers with public blockchains for public verifiability and decentralized identity management, applied to the Swiss Remote Postal Voting system to mitigate existing threats.
Trust in electoral processes is fundamental for democracies. Further, the identity management of citizen data is crucial, because final tallies cannot be guaranteed without the assurance that every final vote was cast by an eligible voter. In order to establish a basis for a hybrid public verifiability of voting, this work (1) introduces Proverum, an approach combining a private environment based on private permissioned Distributed Ledgers with a public environment based on public Blockchains, (2) describes the application of the Proverum architecture to the Swiss Remote Postal Voting system, mitigating threats present in the current system, and (3) addresses successfully the decentralized identity management in a federalistic state.