Implementation of Open Vote Network in Blockchain Signaling System Using Decentralized Autonomous Organization Smart Contract in Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

In the paper "A blockchain-Based Architecture for Collaborative DDoS Mitigation," Rodrigues, Bocek, Lareida, Hausheer, Rafati, and Stiller proposed a collaborative DDoS signaling system using the Ethereum blockchain and smart contract for AS owners to cooperate and mitigate a DDoS attack in a fully decentralized manner. Rodrigues, Bocek, and Stiller later created a proof-of-concept of this system and called it Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS). In their architecture, AS owners will deploy their smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain for other members to signal when they are under attack by sending IP addresses to be white or blacklisted to the smart contract. BloSS uses a central registry to store information on participating Autonomous Systems (AS) IP addresses it managed, Ethereum wallet addresses, and their smart contact address for victims to report attacker's IP addresses in the event of a DDoS attack. However, a trusted central authority is required to manage the registry. The members of the collaboration need to believe that the central authority is honest in performing its role since membership in the alliance is up to the central authority discretion. McCorry, Siamak, and Hao present a decentralized and self-tallying voting protocol with maximum voter secrecy using Ethereum smart contract called Open Vote Network (OV-net) that does not rely upon any trusted authority to tally the vote. Nevertheless, it still requires an administrator to set up the election and add voters to the election. Therefore, the voters still need to trust a central authority to manage the election and to make sure those who are eligible to vote are in the voters' list. The goal of this project is to implement a self-managed blockchain scheme based on the collaborative DDoS mitigation architecture proposed by Rodrigues et al., where participation in the collaboration requires members' consensus. We introduced a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) smart contract called ElectionCommissioner to manage the membership to BloSS central registry. The addition or removal of member needs to the registry needs to be proposed by an existing member. When a member submits a proposal, the Election Commissioner will advertise the proposal to the community. The members then register their interest to vote by sending their voting key and Ethereum token (ETH) as a deposit, which is refundable after the election. The Election Commissioner executes an “election process” (described in section IV) to determine the support for a proposal to add or remove a member. After voting, the Election Commissioner will tally the vote and if the executes the proposal if it is accepted by most of the registered voters.