Cryptographers Cancel Election Results After Losing Decryption Key

[erek]

"The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) was forced to cancel its leadership election after a trustee lost their portion of the Helios voting system's decryption key, making it impossible to reveal or verify the final results. Ars Technica reports:The IACR said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly."Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."

The IACR will switch to a two-of-three private key system to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Moti Yung, the trustee responsible for the incident, has resigned and is being replaced by Michael Abdalla."

Source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11...-election-results-after-losing-decryption-key

 

[travm]

Frightening. Vote with pencils.
It scares me that we move to electronic voting in some places.

 

[Sycraft]

Frightening. Vote with pencils.
It scares me that we move to electronic voting in some places.

Ya I'm a fan of scannable paper ballots. You still get high speed tabulation with the scanners but it makes it easy to audit and keep records. It also make keeping votes secret fairly easy: You have the voter on the envelope once you've verified that they are a legit voter, you open it, take out the ballot, toss the envelope, then send off the ballot for counting. This once and for all time separates the ability to tell who cast a given ballot and the process is easy to monitor to be sure it is being done correctly.

 

[Nobu]

Ya I'm a fan of scannable paper ballots. You still get high speed tabulation with the scanners but it makes it easy to audit and keep records. It also make keeping votes secret fairly easy: You have the voter on the envelope once you've verified that they are a legit voter, you open it, take out the ballot, toss the envelope, then send off the ballot for counting. This once and for all time separates the ability to tell who cast a given ballot and the process is easy to monitor to be sure it is being done correctly.

**Save the envelope separately. If you just toss it, you can't verify that every vote corresponds to a single voter, or that a single voter hasn't voted multiple times. Well, maybe you can, but the envelope would allow you to verify that any other methods you used to deduce those things are accurate.

 

[toast0]

**Save the envelope separately. If you just toss it, you can't verify that every vote corresponds to a single voter, or that a single voter hasn't voted multiple times. Well, maybe you can, but the envelope would allow you to verify that any other methods you used to deduce those things are accurate.

Well, you don't really toss it, but once you've accepted the envelope and taken the ballot out, even if you review the envelope later and find it wanting, you can't remove the ballot, because you won't know which it is.

You can use the saved envelopes to investigate voting misconduct --- like if you receive two ballots from the same voter, it would be nice to have both envelopes to maybe figure out what happened, but you can't uncount a ballot that was opened.

On this election for an organization of cryptologic research, it seems like they found a real world application --- if your election is so secure that you don't know the results, it's not helpful. Majority of key holders needed to determine results is a lot more recoverable than all the key holders.

 

[sleepeeg3]

Lol at the irony of this one. Good find, erek. "The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR)" forced to stop vote because they lost their cryptography key? This headline sounds made up.

Ya I'm a fan of scannable paper ballots. You still get high speed tabulation with the scanners but it makes it easy to audit and keep records. It also make keeping votes secret fairly easy: You have the voter on the envelope once you've verified that they are a legit voter, you open it, take out the ballot, toss the envelope, then send off the ballot for counting. This once and for all time separates the ability to tell who cast a given ballot and the process is easy to monitor to be sure it is being done correctly.

I like that, except separating the voter from the vote. What if there is a recount/audit? What if people truck in some more fraudulent, scannable ballots? Those are already embedded in Constitutions of local/state governments.
I think the whole scannable idea is great. My area does this.

 

[Sycraft]

Lol at the irony of this one. Good find, erek. "The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR)" forced to stop vote because they lost their cryptography key? This headline sounds made up.

I like that, except separating the voter from the vote. What if there is a recount/audit? What if people truck in some more fraudulent, scannable ballots? Those are already embedded in Constitutions of local/state governments.
I think the whole scannable idea is great. My area does this.

You have to separate the vote from the voter if you want to keep voting secret. Otherwise people can go and find out how you voted. I bet where you live they do to. The way to deal with it is that at the stage of separation, that's where you do the check to see if the voter is legit, if this is their only vote, and if everything is ok or you need to contact them to fix something. Once the ballot is ok you mark the voter off as having voted so it can't happen again, and the ballot goes off for counting. Only through the separation is secrecy maintained.

It is also irreversible because it is physical, not cryptographic. There's no "cracking" it. Unless a record was made of what ballot belonged to who, and there are people watching to make sure that doesn't happen, there's no way for someone later to reunite ballots with their envelopes.

 

[sleepeeg3]

You have to separate the vote from the voter if you want to keep voting secret. Otherwise people can go and find out how you voted.

Yes, people can go and find out how you voted, but those are your elected officials and I can't think of an instance where individual voters were ever made public. Even if it was made public (and it's not), so what? There is no right to privacy in the Constitution (although I wish there was).

The way to deal with it is that at the stage of separation, that's where you do the check to see if the voter is legit, if this is their only vote, and if everything is ok or you need to contact them to fix something.

Good idea on paper, but in the real world, this is how elections are stolen. What if there IS no check and people truck in fake ballots, like I mentioned before? Go look at what continually happens in Broward County, FL every election. Rampant cheating.
No way to audit means you may never know how or where people are cheating the system.