VLock

Building a secure, collaborative smart e-decision system that offers the fairness and anonymity of participants involved in the decision making, while preventing rigging and electoral fraud has been a challenge for a long time. Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the blockchain

Project Title

VLock

Project Area of Specialization

Blockchain

Project Summary

Building a secure, collaborative smart e-decision system that offers the fairness and anonymity of participants involved in the decision making, while preventing rigging and electoral fraud has been a challenge for a long time. Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the blockchain, is presented as a game-changer for many of the existing and emerging technologies because of its distinct feature allowing a decentralized approach and enabling trusted applications without the dependency of a middleman. It is reshaping various business domains and has its high use case in identity management/voting. As per our survey, currently, no university in Pakistan has a proper polling system, and all decision-making procedures are either handled manually or through social media platforms which in the end create drastic problems, not only for university management and faculty members but for the students as well. Taking Blockchain Identity Management use-case as a baseline, VLock is Ethereum based smart electronic decision-making system for the University where one can collaboratively make decision regarding the issues and activities happening in the Universities which will help in making fair decision preventing rigging and electoral fraud and minimizing the wastage of resources.

It is designed specifically for Riphah International University that is built upon ethereum blockchain. The proposed system will help to overcome the issues being observed at the university during polling or real-time voting while saving resources. Moreover, if we use this system on a broader level, we can consider it for secure public election/democratic voting which is a serious issue in any country. From a business point of view, different companies can use VLock to take fair market reviews & votes of their product without involving anyone’s identity which will help them grow their business.

Project Objectives

Decision making within the world has a serious impact. It plays a vital role in taking any initiative as reviews and votes of the people can entirely change the decision and leads toward failure or success of an organization/individual. The most common way in which votes are collected in Universities or anywhere is through a paper-based system, or sometimes digital voting systems are being used but the problems with such systems are separate from the underlying technologies. Security of digital voting is always the biggest concern when considering the implementation of a digital voting system. In some cases, on public level voting, government-issued IDs used to verify voters’ identities even when dealing with current images, facial recognition systems, there may be a chance of high error rates. In addition, hackers may try to trick the system.  One way the security issues can be potentially solved is through the technology of blockchain.To deal with the mentioned problems we need to find a secure, confidential, tamper-proof, and the latest way to automate the polling and decision-making process.

The objective of the VLock project is to design a blockchain-based polling/voting system that a transparent decision or action can be made regarding any activity or issue happening in the University. Security issues and electoral fraud can be potentially solved through the technology of blockchain as it connects people - peer to peer in a network removing central entity or hold. Through blockchain identity management feature once the user has cast his/her vote, blockchain would not let him vote twice and his vote will be safe on blockchain in form of a transaction, permanently. Voters can verify whether their votes were counted or not using their unique hash. Verifying your identity helps prevent fraud and ensures that no one, except you, can perform a transaction or cast a vote from your account. Thus by using blockchain there is no chance of electoral fraud in any case. Once the result has been locked in the blockchain, nobody can tamper it, no unauthorized person can access it and the result that is being counted on the blockchain will be visible to the concerned authorities.  Our project will change the paradigm of the polling system. It will make everything transparent and trustable to everyone.

Project Implementation Method

We have followed agile methodology in our project as agile is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle. VLock is a research-based project which was borne to changes. We developed the idea from the inception phase and gradually added details to its design and solution based on our own research, surveys, and feedback received from faculty members and our project supervisor. Initially, after our analysis and research phase, we had decided to implement VLock system in blockchain. Then, after our more research and analysis we realized that we can minimize the cost of the project by keeping unnecessary data off-chain. That’s why we have decided to use Agile methodology so that we can incorporate any change at phase or step. For off-chain data, we decided to use NoSQL database (MongoDB) for off chain data storage. For backend services we are using nodejs, express with MongoDB. After our research, we have realized that reactjs is most compatible with blockchain that is why we used reactjs for the frontend designing of our project as it is easy to integrate with blockchain. The design or the main framework followed for this project was based on IEEE Research paper. We modified the presented approach by incorporating the voting process in addition to the vote count procedure as part of blockchain ledger. This was needed to ensure the anonymity of a voter and it will enable building trust, reliability, and convenience. We used Git for version controlling of our project as it is easy to use and learn and it is a lightweight tool. It helps us to keep the backup of our project. To increase the productivity and performance of the project we used to have meetings twice a week with our supervisor. In our meeting, we discuss issues and challenges that we face at every step. For the Quality assurance of our project we are using black-box testing and generated usecase based test cases. We followed the equivalence class partitioning technique & boundary value analysis for test data. The software architecture is followed according to UML design format. It includes Use case diagrams, fully dressed use cases, domain model, system sequence diagram, activity diagram, basic architecture diagram, detailed architecture diagram, and deployment diagram. For database design, we designed the Object model as we are working with NoSQL database. We used google docs for all documents for powerful real-time collaboration and communication to facilitate everyone to access, make and notice the changes in the documents anytime, anywhere.

Benefits of the Project

Transparency is the first benefit that VLock provides as it is on blockchain which is a decentralized ledger that can bring trust at every stage of the voting process. All votes could be verified as soon as voting is finished to ensure they are all counted correctly. Secondly, the most important factor of the polling/voting system is security. Without substantial security mechanisms in place, malicious actors can enter the system and alter the outcome. The technology on which VLock is built has the ability to introduce a seemingly unhackable system. Thirdly, people want privacy when voting and do not want others to know who or what they voted for. VLock allows for secure and anonymous votes which can be verified at any moment. Another benefit that VLock provides is that it is impossible for a user to vote twice or to commit electrical fraud using our portal. Fourth, in our University the current (manual) voting or decision-making process often takes time to collate and process answers. Often when students are in different areas and are not all together, it can be difficult to gather all the information quickly and efficiently. This leads to time and cost issues. Vlock will resolve all these issues and results can be gathered and processed quickly and straight after the voting has finished. No one can alter the results at any case. From a business point of view, Vlock is a platform where users or organizations can create their own polls with poll management controls and can create surveys without bearing software cost. They can directly use this system or can integrate this component in their own website so in this way this will be a very cost-effective platform to get a market opinion about their products. It will also help in growing their businesses. Another major benefit of this system is that we have designed it in a way that in the future it can be modified in a way that it can be used by any University and even for public election.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

After completing this system we will achieve to manage and maintain our voting system through blockchain. It will be a reactjs based web software application for both admin and the users. Through our system, any voting authorities will manage the process of voting or polling automatically by blockchain. Confidentiality of voters and vote counting mechanism will be guaranteed through blockchains transactions. Since the project is designed with Blockchain and react it is more feasible on Ubuntu/operating system for installation.   We used the latest technologies in this project in the form of microservices, we are storing all sensitive data in the blockchain but by considering cost factors we used mongoDB to manage other system-related information like Dashboard statistics, permissions, notification, etc. To achieve the performance goal we also used nodejs as backend technology due to its asynchronous nature. We have used JWT authentication and Twilio SMS services. In case the user forgets his/her password, system will send a new password to his/her number. For secure voting process, voters will be provided with a unique account/ token available on their portal after login, for vote casting. Once a voter has cast the vote over the blockchain network, he/she will not be able to cast the vote again as a consensus mechanism has been applied to it which ensures no individual could vote twice. Moreover, voters can verify their vote via Etherscan whether their vote was counted correctly or not. For a better understanding regarding importing private key in metamask (crypto wallet), we are also providing a user manual to provide a guide to VLock users regarding the whole process. We have made a video for our users to understand the complete flow of our system. We will also provide detailed documentation consisting of different chapters with all the requirements, design implementation, and testing details of the system.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Software System

Core Industry

IT

Other Industries

Others

Core Technology

Blockchain

Other Technologies

Others

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Peace and Justice Strong Institutions

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com