Quantum-Resistant Blockchain Framework for Remote eVoting Via Integration of Adaptive Governance, Homomorphic Encryption, and Audit for Secure Digital Democracy Scenarios
Aug 2026· Journal of Intelligent Decision Making and Information Science· Vol 3, pp. 1086-1105· 0 citations· 29 references
TL;DR
A quantum-resistant, multi-layer blockchain architecture has been developed to enable remote voting with continuous verifiability and resilience, strengthening digital democracy through post-quantum security, adaptive governance, and intelligent, continuous optimizations.
Abstract
Online voting platforms that rely on classical cryptography and centralized trust anchors face escalating challenges as the demand for secure and transparent digital elections grows. Such systems remain exposed to quantum-era threats, insider manipulation, and delayed audit mechanisms, which together can undermine public confidence and electoral legitimacy. To counter these risks, a quantum-resistant, multi-layer blockchain architecture has been developed to enable remote voting with continuous verifiability and resilience. This architecture resolves key weaknesses through five integrated layers. Quantum-Resistant Distributed Ledger Initialization (QR-DLI) embeds lattice-based cryptography, specifically Kyber and Dilithium variants, directly within the genesis block, ensuring the ledger is tamper-proof from inception and immune to quantum brute-force attacks. The Self-Adaptive Smart Contract Governance Engine (SASCG) introduces dynamic, participation-aware rule adjustments, allowing principled governance without manual overrides and ensuring that voting periods and eligibility rules adapt securely in real time. Homomorphic Vote Encryption with Multi-Authority Shard Key Distribution (HVE-MASKD) guarantees ballot confidentiality and authenticity by combining fully homomorphic encryption with distributed key shares, eliminating single points of trust. The Zero-Knowledge Proof–Based Real-Time Audit Layer (ZKP-RTAL) continuously validates ballot integrity while concealing vote content, creating a public and immutable audit trail. Finally, the Federated Performance & Threat Intelligence Optimizer (FPTIO) aggregates live telemetry and historical attack data to proactively tune consensus parameters and predict potential intrusions without interrupting the election process. Collectively, these layers achieve sub-second cryptographic operations, transaction throughput exceeding 1,500 TPS, over 99 % fraud detection accuracy, and strong scalability. The model provides a future-ready, auditable replacement for current e Voting infrastructures, strengthening digital democracy through post-quantum security, adaptive governance, and intelligent, continuous optimizations.
The study evaluates major post-quantum cryptographic primitives, assesses their suitability for blockchain environments, and proposes a layered architecture grounded in crypto-agility, defense-in-depth, and forward secrecy.
This paper introduces Data Communities as a novel paradigm for privacy-preserving, blockchain-enabled cooperative digital infrastructures, formalized within the Cooperative Digital Infrastructure (CDI) framework and formalizes privacy guarantees through an adversarial model encompassing classical, quantum, insider, and governance-level threats.
The Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) increasingly operates as a multi-agent edge network where robots, sensors, and gateways cooperate autonomously under tight latency and resource constraints. Blockchain can strengthen trust and access control in such deployments, but most edge implementations rely on classical ECC-based signatures, which are vulnerable to quantum-capable adversaries. This paper proposes Adaptive Quantum-Resistant Blockchain (AQRB), a crypto-agile framework that switches among classical, hybrid, and post-quantum (PQ) transaction-authentication modes for multi-agent edge IoRT. AQRB applies ML-DSA-44 (FIPS 204) at the device-tovalidator boundary; the permissioned Ethereum consensus substrate retains classical primitives — a deliberate scope boundary addressed explicitly. The framework pairs an edge permissioned blockchain with oneM2M off-chain storage, selects cryptographic modes via normalised resource and security scores, and coordinates mode changes through a lightweight on-chain governance protocol. We prototype AQRB on a three-node ZedBoard (ARM Cortex-A9, 666 MHz) testbed. ML-DSA-44 achieves sign 1.80 ms and verify 0.75ms — under 0.3% of the 780 ms block-finality budget, confirming the primitive is not the system bottleneck. Under nominal conditions, the adaptive baseline matches classical performance exactly (794 ms E2E, 45 TPS) while fixed-PQC wastes 53% more CPU; under high-criticality conditions, the emergency override commits quantum-resistant M3 on-chain within 830 ms. A simulation-based ablation shows the hysteresis mechanism cuts unnecessary mode-switch churn by 86% without delaying emergency escalation to M3. These results demonstrate that transaction-layer PQC migration is feasible on constrained IoRT edge hardware without sacrificing real-time performance; AQRB is deliberately scoped to transaction authentication and identity records, not full consensus-layer quantum resistance, which is left as future work.
Abdessamed Echikr, Mustapha Bensalah· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Redactable blockchains support legitimate on-chain data modifications for regulatory compliance and controlled data management. Existing constructions often rely on a trusted central authority (CA), introducing a key escrow problem and a single point of failure. Decentralized extensions mitigate these issues by distributing the role of the CA among multiple parties, but they incur two major drawbacks: 1) the authorization of rewriting privileges requires a modifier to interact with multiple authorities, bringing substantial communication costs; and 2) the existing decentralized schemes only guarantee security under a weak static model, which requires the adversary to commit all queries in advance and fails to capture realistic adversarial behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new redactable blockchain design that minimizes communication cost, eliminates key escrow, and provides stronger security guarantees. Our solution retains a centralized architecture to significantly reduce the communication cost compared to decentralized designs. Moreover, the CA does not possess or issue secret keys to the modifiers for performing rewriting operations, thereby eliminating the key escrow problem. To enable a generic design with rigorous security analysis, we introduce a cryptographic primitive, registered policy-based chameleon hash (RPCH), and formalize three security models that capture realistic adversarial capabilities. We propose a generic construction of RPCH accompanied by formal security proofs. Based on this framework, we present two concrete instantiations. The first is optimized for efficiency, leveraging a prime-order group and achieving selective security. The second prioritizes security guarantees by attaining adaptive security in a composite-order setting. To evaluate performance, we implement and compare our construction against both the classic PCH-based scheme and the state-of-the-art decentralized variant. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a strong balance between security and efficiency, and is particularly well-suited for redactable blockchain applications where only a small fraction of users are authorized to perform modifications.
Shengmin Xu, Xianxin Zhao, Xiaoguo Li et al.· IEEE Transactions on Informa...· 0 citations
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy by keeping data decentralized. However, traditional FL architectures suffer from critical trust issues, including vulnerability to model poisoning attacks, a lack of incentives for honest participation, and the inability to verify the quality of submitted model updates. Blockchain-based solutions have been proposed to address these challenges, but they often require participants to bootstrap independent validator networks and lock additional capital, limiting scalability and practical adoption. This paper proposes EigenFL, a novel FL framework secured through blockchain restaking, leveraging EigenLayer to provide cryptoeconomic security and decentralized validation by reusing Ethereum's existing validator infrastructure. Participants are economically incentivized to submit honest updates, while malicious behavior is discouraged through slashing mechanisms. Model updates are validated off-chain by independent operators, and their outcomes are immutably recorded on-chain, ensuring accountability and robustness. EigenFL demonstrates how blockchain restaking can transform FL from a trust-based paradigm into a cryptoeconomically secured framework, enabling verifiable and decentralized training.
Giovanni Maria Cristiano, Salvatore D’Antonio, Giovanni Mazzeo· Annual International Compute...· 0 citations
Preservation and secure treatment of digital evidence across different courts of justice are serious issues due to trust, information leakage, scalability and dynamism. Existing centralised and blockchain-based evidence databases are vulnerable to single points of failure, are privacy-unfriendly, or have significant performance gaps at scale. To overcome these defects, this paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy-preserving and scalable electronic evidence management system for the judicial alliance environments. The proposed system will be constructed based on a consortium blockchain architecture, with HotStuffle Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol, Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) based access authorization, and a more operational Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) architecture. It is an on-chain/off-chain storage structure where cryptographic hash values, metadata, and access logs are stored on-chain to provide integrity, auditability, and non-repudiation. Conversely, encrypted electronic evidence files are not kept on blockchains to reduce storage overheads. ZKP supports privacy-sensitive authentication without disclosing valuable identity or role information, and the improved CP-ABE protocol supports finely grained, revocable access control by storing access policies in ciphertext. This has been supported by extensive testing through large-scale experimentation to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed framework. Scalability: The results show that end-to-end access latency increases by 240-910 ms as the number of validator nodes increases, confirming HotStuffle's consensus' scalability advantage. The system's throughput is almost linearly related to the rate of transaction arrivals, reaching a peak of 390 transactions/second, after which it starts levelling off. The overhead of ZKP during verification is low, and verification time increases by 36 ms and 8 ms for proofs of 10 KB and 80 KB, respectively. In addition, the time required to decrypt CP-ABE increases gradually with the number of access attributes, ranging from 5 to 285 ms. Conversely, even when 40 per cent of users are revoked, the revocation processing time remains reasonable. Security and comparative analysis demonstrate that the described framework can provide better privacy protection and fine-grained access control, resist collusion and replay attacks, and is more advantageous than existing blockchain-based models of electronic evidence sharing. Overall, the proposed system offers adequate scalability, privacy, and security; thus, it can be used for large-scale deployment of judicial alliances.
Fadhil Kadhem Zaidan, Nuha Salim Mohammed, Ibtesam Jomaa Hawi et al.· Al-Noor Journal of Engineeri...· 0 citations