itugen
anonymous and transparent voting on blockchain
Guillaume participated in the 3rd ZKProof Workshop (Home Edition), and he had the opportunity to do a “lightning talk” to present itugen during the 30th April 2020 session (link to presentation).
Vincenzo presented the itugen technical paper at the ITASEC20 conference in February 2020.
itugen is designed to be a blockchain platform exclusively dedicated to e-voting. Using the most recent advances in zero-knowledge protocols as well and quantum-resistant cryptography, itugen will provide maximum transparency and ease of use, while ensuring voter privacy, voter confidentiality, secrecy of ongoing voting and protection against double votes. It is also designed to be massively scalable (millions of voters).
Given the current world-wide political disaffection, as well as the effects of COVID-19, we believe that tools like itugen can also be helpful to foster new ways of democratic participation in new political processes - what might be called democracy 2.0.
The itugen technology stack is ready now and our technical implementation paper was published on 6th December 2019. Some initial coding was done in early 2020, but the project has been inactive since then. We are looking for partners and investors to help resume development and enable us to move to POC stage.
We plan to build itugen using isekai, a zero-knowledge / verifiable computation framework that is being developed by Sikoba Research (http://research.sikoba.com). isekai is a ZKP tool that supports multiple ZKP libraries and proof systems, namely: libsnark (Groth16 and BCTV14a), dalek (Bulletproofs) and libiop (Aurora and Ligero). It also supports a wide subset of C and C++. [isekai Github]
As to the blockchain middleware, we plan to use the Babble consensus engine [Babble Github]
A technical description of the itugen e-voting scheme can be found here:
[ Itugen: Transparent and Anonymous voting
without Tallying Authorities (.pdf) ]
Voters will submit votes to the blockchain themselves, and will be able to track their
votes; there will only be a bare minimum of on-chain computation: as far as possible,
both proofs and verifications will be done off-chain;
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itugen will be a scalable system, with a goal to handle millions of voters;
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The poll organiser pays all fees, voters participate for free;
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Quantum-resistant crypto is used to protect voter anonymity;
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An economic model with 2 tokens: a utility token whose value will depend on
platform usage, and a stable-token to ensure predictable costs of organising polls;
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Validator incentives will be adapted to the specific e-voting use case, with periods of
intense activity during polling periods, and periods of little activity between polls;
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Voters will be required to provide a PoW for spam resistance;
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Organisers will be able to purchase specific time slots, with prices variable to favor
a good usage of the resources;
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Governance for other blockchains and tokens: we will make possible votes where
eligible users have accounts of a specific token (ERC20 tokens for instance), allowing
other blockchains or projects to easily implement governance using
itugen
