Elections in Moscow – the voting system on the blockchain crashed

On Sunday in Russia there are more than six thousand elections of various levels. In Moscow, for the first time, a blockchain-based electronic voting system was introduced. However, in the morning there were reports that she had failed.

According to the Campaign Insider Telegram channel, at block No. 30 (Central and South Chertanovo), recording information about votes on the blockchain hung for half an hour.

“The stub in the grelode worked, the data disappeared, then it appeared,” the channel’s author quoted the election commission as saying.

It is reported that there was a problem with the encryption of votes, because of which there was a zero transaction and people could not vote for 15 minutes.

“Already two voters cannot vote in person. And developers can not give an answer when it works. Now they are overloading the voice encryption server , ”writes Campaign Insider.

According to the information at 10:30

– CryptoPRO service fell off, testing the fix
– voters complain that it is impossible to vote, and when they re-enter, they write that the vote was cast

Note that the final list of participants in electronic voting includes 11 thousand Muscovites. To avoid double voting the day before the election, all of them were deleted from the lists in the precinct election commissions.

Recall that in August, the online voting system developed by the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT) was hacked by French cryptographer Pierreck Godry in just 20 minutes.

According to Godry, the problem was the encryption keys were too small (less than 256 bits). The cryptographer then suggested that DIT employees might encounter features of the programming language for smart contracts Solidity, which does not allow directly operating with integers whose size exceeds 256 bits.

The DIT did not recognize the fact of breaking the encryption scheme, but promised to increase the key size to 1024 bits.

Update 1 (11:33): Electronic voting in Chertanovo (30th district) was restored, but cannot guarantee the stable operation of the service. A DIT spokesman said they should give information to the media so that citizens do not vote so far. Possible hourly break.

Update 2 (16:45): By this time, the electronic voting service has been restored, but more than a thousand votes have not passed due to a malfunction. Meanwhile, the deputy chairman of the Moscow City Election Commission, Yuri Yermolov, said that by 16:00 the turnout at the elections to the Moscow City Duma had reached almost 80%.

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