Antivirus developer and security research company Kaspersky Lab today announced the release of a blockchain-based voting system named Polys designed for organizations, businesses and universities to tally votes electronically in a private and secure way.

The platform uses a distributed ledger, or blockchain, and cryptography in order to securely record votes in a manner that is difficult to tamper with and transparently auditable by participants.

This is done by recording votes as transactions in a ledger, which is distributed among multiple parties. The vote and the identity of the voter (along with metadata such as the device it happened on, biometric and location data) can be tied together in a transaction along with a timestamp showing it happened. Those transactions are hardened with cryptographic keys, which in turn allow voters to double-check votes using private keys.

The name of the blockchain product, Polys, is a play on the Greek word “Polis,” which often refers to the body of citizens, or in this case voters using the platform.

Polys is an experimental product developed by the Kaspersky Lab Business Incubator and is part of an endeavor by Kaspersky to develop products for industries where safety and security are important.

“One such area is online voting,” Vartan Minasyan, head of investment and innovation at Kaspersky Lab said. She went on to say that the team realized that blockchain technology could be combined with “the company’s cybersecurity expertise” to solve key problems related to privacy, transparency and security of online voting.

To build Polys, Kaspersky Lab used Ethereum, a blockchain protocol designed to allow for smart contracts, which are contracts that execute when particular criteria are met. Smart contracts allow ballot verification and vote tallies to be performed in a decentralized manner across the blockchain.

With the digital revolution and the internet, organizations and businesses can have people scattered across the globe. This makes voting difficult using traditional systems such as ballots and risky when using computer systems due to how easily electronic records can be falsified or tampered with.

In order to solve these problems, the Polys voting system relies on the blockchain technology to provide privacy for voters through encryption but at the same time permit a system that can tally and process those encrypted votes. Once a tally is done it can be mathematically proven (using the same cryptography) that it is fair and each voter can audit their own vote using their private encryption key to see that their vote was not tampered with.

“Blockchain is increasingly being implemented by a vast number of industries, and we believe that decentralizing the voting procedure will ensure a fair process and create a high level of trust in the system,” said Jutta Steiner, co-founder of Parity Technologies and consultant on the project.

One such implementation was developed by TMX Group Ltd. in conjunction with professional services company Accenture Plc. for a shareholder voting system. Other industries have sought blockchain solutions for securing logistics – such as shipping and manifests and marine insurance – and even for securing trades of shares and stocks themselves, including one developed by the London stock exchange and IBM Corp.

Organizations and businesses interested in trying the Polys voting system can do immediately on a free plan, called Basic by Kaspersky, allowing for unlimited votes and voters and unlimited polls. As for a commercial-grade version, Kaspersky also offers a Pro version, which enables custom identification, white-labeling and rebranding of the service, integration with various other services and additional custom features on request.

Image: Kaspersky Lab