Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.

The increasing demand for a secure and transparent mechanism for verifying academic credentials has led to the exploration of blockchain technology (BT) as a viable solution. This paper presents a three-layered application for the reliable verification of academic credentials, leveraging the immutable and decentralized nature of BT. The system includes a data layer (DL), a blockchain layer (BL), and an application layer (AL). The DL records student records, faculty staff records, and credentials. The BL utilizes smart contracts to record and verify academic records, ensuring their authenticity and integrity. The AL provides a userfriendly interface for various stakeholders, such as students, educational institutions, and employers, to communicate with the system. This effort aims to determine how BT can be utilized to enhance the security, transparency, and efficiency of academic credential verification processes. Efficiency in academic credential verification processes ultimately contributes to a more reliable and effective educational ecosystem.

Due to the large population movement, many countries and institutions need to modernize their voting systems to support a moving society that is becoming more oriented towards Internet technologies. Electronic voting is a service that is not only used by governments but can be used by numerous institutions to benefit in time, cost, and distance access. The use of new technologies should enable the promotion of confidence and credibility of the voting system by allowing auditing of control mechanisms that deal with the privacy of vote, ballot security, and integrity. One of the recent technologies that have attracted a lot of interest in many different areas is Blockchain technology, which represents a collection of linked (chained) data blocks through cryptographic algorithms and stored in a public distributed database. In other words, Blockchain is a distributed data ledger governed by well-known and approved cryptographic principles that are managed by a group of computers that are not owned by a single person or authority. This paper analyses the current trends of usage of Blockchain technologies in the electronic voting system, highlights the challenges and issues raised so far in the community regarding the security and privacy of the vote and the voter, but also other legal aspects.

Digitalisation of public services has already changed the way how we interact with government. The electronic signature, based on public key cryptography, has strengthened the trust towards this transformation. With the recent appearance of the electronic seal, this digital transformation is complete. The new European Union regulation for electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS) has repealed the old directive and provides a regulatory environment. In the meantime, a novel technology based on cryptography rose as an alternative to fulfil these objectives - the blockchain. This paper, analyses the properties of the electronic seal, based on eIDAS regulation, with and without blockchain technology. The developed application uses local X.509 digital certificates and the multichain platform for the creation and deployment of private blockchains. At the end of the paper, an overview of this comparison is provided, using different documents, pointing out the pros and cons of each technology.

Decentralized applications leveraging blockchain technology are gaining widespread adoption within the decentralized applications ecosystem. Interoperability, a fundamental concept facilitating seamless data and processing power exchange across diverse blockchain networks, is paramount in this context. The primary objective of this paper is to explore the transformative potential of "blockchain bridges" in facilitating secure and transparent electronic voting processes across multiple blockchain networks. The study employs a comprehensive analysis of various approaches, including atomic exchanges, sidechains, cross-chain bridges, token wrappers, and interledger protocols. The selection of a specific method is guided by the unique requirements and privacy considerations of the electronic voting use case. The application of two distinct blockchains serves as a practical demonstration, illustrating the principles of blockchain bridges in real-world scenarios. The research reveals that blockchain bridges not only streamline the exchange of data between diverse blockchain networks but also establish a dual decentralization paradigm. This paradigm enables the creation of openly maintained, purpose-specific, decentralized ledgers for electronic voting. The integration of blockchain bridges significantly reduces the risk of fraud, instilling greater confidence in the accuracy of election results. Thus, by presenting a comprehensive array of approaches and emphasizing their practical application, this research contributes to advancing the understanding and implementation of blockchain technology in the critical domain of electronic voting. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-04-04 Full Text: PDF

Exchange of information through the web took place inside a trusted environment and thus user privacy was assured by default. Nowadays, ensuring user privacy is becoming one of the most desirable features of new technology, and Blockchain is not an exception. The Blockchain is a decentralized technology, open, and public platform where all transactions are stored and viewed from nodes, an approach known as “Web of Trust.” Although these transactions tend to be anonymous but in the case of the banking sector, user privacy requires special attention. In centralized systems, the implementation of privacy is no longer a challenge, using a hierarchical approach such as Public Key Infrastructure. This paper presents a broad landscape and state of art of user transaction privacy in Blockchain technology using the Web of Trust approach. Furthermore, we present a novel approach using the Public Key Infrastructure for assuring user privacy adding an optionally encrypted field in blocks in transactions. We have used Bithomp, as a free and open-source tool with the Testnet platform, and Ripple as the best known in the implementation of the payment system to implement the proposed approach. The paper concludes with the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach.