Zhaorun Lin

Zhaorun Lin

An MPhil student in Computer Science @ Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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Blind Vote: Economical and Secret Blockchain-based Voting

Published in IEEE Blockchain, 2024

Abstract — Electronic voting has been a hot research topic for decades and has recently garnered much attention due to the invention of programmable blockchains that support smart contracts. This is the ideal framework and technology for electronic voting since voting protocols implemented as smart contracts automatically inherit many desired properties from the underlying blockchain, e.g. verifiability, transparency and pseduonymity. However, the public and decentralized nature of the blockchain allows all transactions to be traced by everyone and thus voters’ choices would be disclosed publicly. There are many solutions to make blockchain-based voting fully anonymous and untraceable. A recent example is Tornado Vote [1] (ICBC 2023). Such protocols often rely on zero-knowledge proofs, especially zkSNARKS, to achieve secrecy and break the link between a voter’s public key and vote. However, verifying these proofs on-chain is expensive and uses a considerable amount of gas (execution fees).

Recommended citation: A. K. Goharshady and Z. Lin, "Blind Vote: Economical and Secret Blockchain-Based Voting," 2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2024, pp. 46-53, doi: 10.1109/Blockchain62396.2024.00016. /files/blind-vote.pdf

Improved Gas Optimization of Smart Contracts

Published in FSEN, 2025

Abstract — Smart contracts are programs executed on top of a blockchain consensus protocol. Their compiled code (bytecode) is stored on the blockchain and is immutable after deployment. They are self-enforcing in the sense that any function call to a smart contract is executed by all nodes on the network, ensuring that they all reach consensus about the final state of the contract. To prevent denial-of-service attacks, such an execution is costly by design. A “gas” cost is assigned to each bytecode operation, roughly proportional to the resources required to execute it, and any user who initiates a function call to a smart contract has to pay the total gas cost of the resulting execution. On Ethereum alone, the users pay an astounding gas cost of more than 4 billion USD/year.

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talks

teaching

Computer Organization

Undergraduate course, CSE, HKUST, 2024

Worked as a teaching assistant that hosted lab sessions to give students hands-on experience of Logisim.