The College of Computer Science and Information Technology at University of Basrah organized a scientific lecture entitled:

BAVS-ZK: Anonymous Blockchain Voting Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Secure Key Management

The lecture aimed to address a fundamental problem plaguing current electronic voting systems: their inability to reconcile the transparency necessary for public verification with the secrecy essential for voter protection. This was achieved by presenting an anonymous electronic voting system based on blockchain technology and zero-knowledge proofs.

The lecture, presented by researcher Hawraa Mohammed Hassan Ali and supervised by Prof.Dr. Raad Abdul Hassan Mahjar, included a presentation of three original research contributions: the HME-KG scheme for deriving a unique secret key for each voter, AES-256-GCM encryption for credential protection during storage, and Groth16 zk-SNARK proofs for direct anonymous verification on the Ethereum Sepolia network. It also included the results of a pilot evaluation on 10,000 voters, which demonstrated a scalability coefficient of R²=0.9998 and a 38.6% reduction in gas costs compared to leading benchmark systems. Furthermore, a systematic comparison with eleven systems published between 2017 and 2025 confirmed that BAVS-ZK is the first system to combine structured voter key management, full on-chain verification, and extensive pilot evaluation without relying on any trusted intermediary.