Descripció del projecte
This research project aims to develop a new secure, anonymous, verifiable and scalable electronic voting protocol, based on advanced cryptographic technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Threshold Cryptography, Merkle trees and decentralized infrastructures. The aim is to design a digital voting system that can be reliably used in participatory processes of all scales, while ensuring voter privacy, count integrity and the absence of centralized points of trust.
The research addresses key challenges of electronic voting: ensuring universal verifiability of the process, preserving the anonymity of the vote at all times, avoiding manipulation or dependence on central entities, allowing voting with hundreds of thousands of participants, and avoiding vote buying or coercion. To achieve this, the project will explore and develop an architecture based on: 1) Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (ZK-SNARKs) technology to validate votes and state transitions without revealing private information, 2) efficient cryptographic structures to manage the census and state of the electoral process, 3) re-encryption and homomorphic cryptography to guarantee secret voting and verifiable counting, 4) distributed key generation to prevent unilateral decryption, and 5) the use of blockchain and rollups to ensure that the voting process works in an immutable and scalable manner.
The project is not limited to a theoretical model, but the ultimate goal is its implementation in production. The doctoral student will participate in all phases of the process: cryptographic design, prototype implementation, security analysis, circuit optimization and testing, and experimental evaluation of the protocol in distributed environments.
The expected social impact of the project is high, as it should contribute very significantly to reducing the costs of organizing voting processes and strengthening their guarantees and, therefore, the legitimacy of the decisions that arise from them. Using cryptography terminology, voting is a fundamental primitive of democracy. Bottom-up: in the short term, associations, communities of practice, etc.; in the medium term, local administrations, large associations, etc.; and in the long term, state elections, statutory processes, etc.
At the level of software availability, the project must make significant contributions to the corpus of free software, including the addition of cryptographic libraries, testing scripts (or testing if you want to Catalanize), etc.
At the level of scientific production, at least two publications in first quartile (Q1) indexed journals are expected, and participation in three conferences with publication of the proceedings, one of which is first level (A).
Despite its eminently techno-scientific nature, the project must also consider, at a minimum, legal aspects, such as the management of highly sensitive personal data (political preferences), and economic aspects, such as incentive systems to make the developed system economically sustainable.
The project will be carried out jointly between Vocdoni Association and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, with external support from Pompeu Fabra University, in a research environment with very strong technological and university-business and business-university knowledge transfer components.
This project is built on the foundation of Vocdoni’s DAINCI platform, taking its architecture to the next level of cryptographic maturity and scalability (from TRL4 to TRL8).
The Research Methodology will be Design Science Research (DSR), combined with the analysis and formal testing of cryptographic protocols, ensuring the transition from proof of concept (PoC) to a productive system.
The workload is equivalent to 3 years full-time. During the first year, the literature review and the definition of the system properties will be carried out. In June 2026, the doctoral student will have to submit and defend a Research Plan where he will have to determine with a high degree of precision the research questions, as well as the work plan to obtain the answers and the validation indicators of these, both at a scientific and industrial level. In the second year, the bulk of the work will focus on the development of the system (design, development, testing and deployment). In the third year, the focus will be on market validation and refinement of the solution, as well as the exploration of its application in other areas not initially foreseen.
The doctoral student will have access to the practical experience and deployment infrastructure of Vocdoni, complemented by the analysis capacity and advanced simulation resources of the UPC laboratories.
It is a project especially suitable for candidates with an interest in cryptography, computer security, blockchain technology, distributed protocols, formal verification or electronic voting, and who want to work in an environment where the research has direct and immediate application in real systems.
