Leading cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has unveiled a blockchain-based secure online voting system, Polys.

Developed at the firm’s Business Incubator, Polys aims to provide anyone with the ability to conduct secure, anonymous and scalable online voting, while ensuring that the results cannot be altered by participants or organizers.

“[W]hen exploring the possible implementations of blockchain in particular, our team realized that this technology combined with the company’s cybersecurity expertise could solve key problems related to the privacy, transparency and security of online voting. We’re excited that we have been able to create a suitable environment for this internal innovation,” Vartan Minasyan, Head of Investment and Innovation at Kaspersky Lab, said.

Polys is based on smart contracts in Ethereum which allows ballot verification and vote tallies to be performed in a decentralized manner. The decentralized nature of blockchain would enable the network’s participants to verify the accuracy of voting execution, while making it difficult for anyone to tamper the voting data as the data is stored in information blocks on the computers of all network participants, instead of servers. The system would make it easier to monitor votes and complete voting audits by independent parties.

In addition, within the Polys voting system, blockchain is encrypted and backed up with mathematical algorithms in order to ensure anonymity, hide intermediate results, and perform calculations on the encrypted data.

“Parity Technologies is excited to be involved with Polys as their platform of choice for such an innovative project. Blockchain is increasingly being implemented by a vast number of industries and we believe that decentralising the voting procedure will ensure a fair process and create a high level of trust in the system,” Jutta Steiner, Co-founder of Parity Technologies, said.

According to the official release, Polys is designed to support voting at all levels and for any number of participants. Upon a special project request, it can be made fully scalable with capacity for thousands of voters in international corporations, political parties, universities, global communities, NGOs, etc. This implementation can be tailored to specific requirements in terms of authorization, the interface design, and integration with other services.

Kaspersky said that the source code of Polys will be publicly available, allowing anyone to test, verify and explore the technology behind it.