rajan-31 / basic-chain

King's Moot

This is the Senior Research project of Liz Tucker and Juan Matiz.

We aim to build a voting system using Hyperledger Fabric (https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric) which is a distributed ledger framework maintained by the Linux Foundation. The purpose of this project is to bring accountability, reliability, and more security to voting systems.

Let it be known that this application currently only runs as intended on macOS. Linux binaries are included in the case that someone may wish to run this application on a Linux distribution if they wished. As is, there are known issues when running this on a Linux machine or VM.

The merkle-tree folder is an implementation of a linked list and merkle tree derived from this repository here: https://github.com/JaeDukSeo/Simple-Merkle-Tree-in-Python. It is completely seperate from the Hyperledger application.

Prerequisites to run this application

In order to run this application you must have Docker version 17.06.2-ce or greater, Node v8 or greater, and npm v5 or greater. The only caveat to this is that if the version of Docker installed on your machine does not have Docker Compose version 1.14 or greater, it is recommended that you install a greater version of Docker.

This application does also have OS dependent tools which are used to generate cryptoconfig materials which are necessary for the application to run. By default, this application uses the bin folder which contains the necessaries binaries to run this application on macOS. In order to run this on a linux machine, you must use the binaries in the linux_bin folder. To make sure the linux_bin is used, edit the generate.sh script in the basic-network folder accordingly.

Installing the Application

This must be done before booting up the blockchain network.

After navigating to the basic-chain/organization/application directory, run npm install to install all of the application dependencies.

It is not necessary to run npm install in the directory where the chaincode is located.

Network commands

Please note this only brings up a basic blockchain network with 1 peer node under 1 organization. The crypto-config material generated is enough to bring up 7 nodes, but as is, adding the other six to the channel does not currently work properly.

After you have cloned this project, open a terminal/command prompt and navigate to the folder where the locally cloned version of this project is.

In order to start the fabric network for the first time, you should run the generate.sh script in the basic-network folder of this repository. This script will generate the necessary config material the application needs to run. Then run start.sh.

To pause the network, make sure you are in the basic-network folder and run ./stop.sh

To completely dismantle the network and remove the generated containers, make sure you are in the basic-network folder and run ./teardown.sh

Please note each time generate.sh is run, new crypto-config material is generated. This means that any files that reference crypto material must be double checked for correct values. The below files must be checked to be sure they correctly reference crypto-config materials.

basic-chain/basic-network/docker-compose.yml basic-chain/organization/application/addToWallet.js

Running the application

When trying to issue or redeem votes on the network, you should use the javascript files under the organization/application directory. You can edit the variables that are submitted for the transaction within those files. The commands to execute these commands are as follows.

node issue.js node redeem.js

You must run these commands under the basic-chain/organization/application folder for them to work. In addition, you must've already run npm install in this folder for these files to execute properly.

Credit

This project was taken from Hyperledger's Fabric-Samples repository, found here: https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-samples. Specifically, the Commercial-Paper tutorial files were used. Files that have been taken from Fabric Samples are marked with SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0. Please keep in mind that these files have been edited for the purposes of this project, but the originals are credited to hyperledger via the Apache 2.0 license markings.

Version 1.0 of this project is called Basic-Chain. The merkle-tree folder was developed and maintained by Juan. The Hyperledger application was developed and maintained by Liz. When referencing the research paper in the docs folder, it corresponds to version 1.0 and 1.0 only.

Any versions beyond 1.0 (Basic-Chain) are developed and maintained by Liz.