Graduate student Satyam Thakur will be defending his thesis titled “Design and Security Analysis of Blockchain-Based E-Voting and Containerization.”

Satyam Thakur thesis defense

• Date: Friday, April 24
• Time: 10:30 a.m.-Noon
• Location: IST 1062
• Current major: M.S. of computer science
• Thesis committee chair: Dr. Arijet Sarker
• Committee members: Dr. Ayesha Dina, Dr. Sarker Monojit Asish, and Dr. Mohammad Farmani.

Abstract

Electronic voting (e-voting) systems represent a promising alternative for modern electoral infrastructure, offering reduced logistical costs, expedited ballot tabulation, and expanded accessibility. As democratic societies increasingly explore digital pathways to modernize electoral processes, the integrity of these systems and the citizen trust they must earn depend not only on rigorous cryptographic design, but critically on the security of the underlying execution environment on which they operate. If that execution layer remains exposed to unpatched vulnerabilities, application-level verifiability is invalidated.

To address this critical dependency, this thesis proposes a multilayer security architecture. At the application layer, the Blockchain-Based Commit-and-Reveal Voting System (BCRVS) decentralizes the voting process and enforces end-to-end verifiability and authority accountability without requiring direct voter interaction with the ledger (blockchain). At the execution environment layer, ReVEX-an automated container vulnerability verification framework that employs large language model agents and prompt optimization technique to deterministically verify whether software vulnerabilities in the deployment environment are genuinely exploitable, mitigating the significant blind spots of conventional security scanning tools.

Together, these contributions establish secure container runtime environment and validate the cryptographic trust of decentralized e-voting applications, preserving the integrity of the democratic electoral process.