Blockchain-Based Secure Voting Mechanism Underlying 5G Network: A Smart Contract Approach

Purpose: With the advancement and modernization of Information and Communication Technology, electronic voting (e-voting) has been adopted across the globe for conducting a secure and efficient voting procedure. However, e-voting can be easily exposed to various malicious attacks such as denial-of-service, malware, insider, compromised credentials, etc., that can risk the voter's privacy and affect the final voting results. Thus, we have considered the decentralized and immutable blockchain technology for completing the voting procedure securely. Nevertheless, many researchers have considered blockchain to mitigate the security and privacy issues of the voting procedure, but they ignored the aspect of cost-efficiency, latency, and response time while voting. Method: The idea of the proposed mechanism is to deploy and implement the smart contract in the Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) involving number of voters electing the candidate with various functionalities. Moreover, we considered the amalgamation of blockchain and IPFS to overcome the data storage cost issues of blockchain for voters and candidates communicating through 5G wireless network. The 5G network, with its low latency, high availability, and high reliability facilitates high data rate and reliable communication between voters and candidates to complete the voting procedure efficiently. Results: The deployed smart contract of the proposed voting mechanism highlight various functionalities required for electing the candidate by the voters. Moreover, the deployed smart contract is evaluated and analyzed considering various performance metrics such as gas consumption analysis for smart contract functions and number of voters, cost analysis for smart contract functions, bit error rate, and storage cost comparison with the traditional scheme. We have also verified the security of the proposed voting mechanism using Echidna security tool which shows the election of candidate without any threat. Conclusion: Finally, we have presented a blockchain-based voting mechanism in which IPFS and 5G is employed to avail the cost-efficient, reliable, and secure candidate election by the voters. Moreover, the voters and candidates can communicate with lower response time and high reliability using 5G network so that smart contract consisting of all the functionalities related to the candidate election can be executed efficiently in the Remix IDE.