Desarrollo de un sistema de votación electrónica utilizando una tecnología de contabilidad distribuida para el almacenamiento seguro de la información

Abstract

Voting is important for the democracy of any country, company or educational institution. At the Universidad Técnica de Machala, the School of Computer Science, made up of the careers of Systems Engineering and Information Technology, annually elects its student representatives in person by voting on paper, but currently due to the inconvenience generated by the agglomerations of people, requires a safe and reliable alternative to electronic voting that allows them to exercise the right to vote online. The main problem with electronic voting systems that store information in centralized databases is that they are much more vulnerable to fraud than voting on paper, since, if the administering entity or a computer attacker were to tamper with the data, it would hardly be detected. For this reason, the objective of this proposal is to develop an electronic voting system using distributed ledger technology DLT for the secure storage of information. The advantage offered by this type of technology is decentralization, since a DLT consists of a network of distributed nodes that, depending on their access configuration, can be public, private or federated. The points of the network verify through consensus mechanisms each transaction carried out and store the information by structuring the data in a chain of blocks or a directed acyclic graph DAG, making use of cryptographic methods that guarantee its security and immutability. Taking into consideration the system requirements and resources necessary for the implementation of the different types of distributed ledger technologies, IOTA was chosen because it is a robust open-source solution that allows to record transactions at no cost and has great potential for scalability. For the development of the proposed voting system, the Agile Block Chain Dapp Engineering methodology, also known as ABCDE, was followed, the JavaScript programming language was used with its Frameworks Express and Vue From a Postgres database, the necessary identifications were obtained to establish the electoral roll with accredited students. These tools made it possible to develop a frontend adaptable to various electronic devices and a functional backend that uses an API with IOTA libraries to save votes safely in a kind of digital ballot box. In the execution of the prototype, a call was set up, lists and candidatures were registered that could be viewed on the informative website; the operation of the voting web application was tested, which provides a hash so that the student can verify their vote correctly registered in IOTA finally, the results obtained were presented on a dashboard. The evaluation of quality in use in accordance with the ISO IEC 25022 2016 standard, demonstrates the viability for the implementation of the technological proposal in real elections of student representatives of the School of Computer Science of the UTMACH, given that users they perceive a level of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction considerably higher with this new IT solution than with the old form of presential voting and other forms of electronic voting.