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#homomorphicencryption#zero-knowledgeproofs#electronicvoting

Theory and Practice of Cryptography

Google TechTalks

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 5 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2011 to 2019.
  • Presented by Steve Weis, member of Google's Applied Security team

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

73K views18 years ago5 recommendations

SecurityComputer scienceCryptographyAlgorithms

Steve Weis introduces modern cryptography, security definitions, and how cryptographic protocols can be used to build verifiable electronic voting systems.

Google Tech Talks December, 19 2007 Topics include: Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Using Cryptography in Practice and at Google, Proofs of Security and Security Definitions and A Special Topic in Cryptography This talk is one in a series hosted by Google University: Wednesdays, 11/28/07 - 12/19/07 from 1-2pm Speaker: Steve Weis Steve Weis received his PhD from the Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT, where he was advised by Ron Rivest. He is a member of Google's Applied Security (AppSec) team and is the technical lead for Google's internal cryptographic library, KeyMaster.

Why it's here

5 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent introduction to cryptographic voting protocols that allow voters to verify their ballots without compromising secrecy.

kaoDon Hacker News • Recommends

On “An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting”

I can't believe this talk hasn't been posted yet! Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Elections with Cryptography link to this video This is probably one of the homomorphic schemes mentioned in TFA. It's very old (2007-ish?) and the state of the art probably advanced, but it's very interesting and addresses a number of points that are not cared for in TFA (like secret ballots verifiable by the voter but impossible to prove to anyone else).
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maeon3on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Free university lectures on computer science”

Youtube users: 'UserGroupsatGoogle' and 'GoogleTechTalks' post some epic content for the more advanced programmer. Continuous Integration with Hudson: link Cryptography Theory and practice: link to this video
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aianuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Software used to count Australian Senate votes is a “trade secret””

> counted by hand. By whom? Overseen by whom? Who oversees the overseers? Not to mention people make mistakes, ballots get dumped, and nobody has any evidence their vote was actually counted. Here's a long but fascinating tech talk on a real solution: link to this video
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aianuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad”

Unfortunately this enables someone to coerce or bribe you into voting for a certain candidate, since the coercer would be able to demand to see your receipt and verify you complied. Here's a rather long but very interesting tech talk about electronic voting schemes which maintain the secret ballot property: link to this video
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grzmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove”

Here's a link to slides from a talk Ronald Rivest gave back in March 2016 at ACM-IEEE: "Auditability and Verifiability of Elections" link It covers a lot of what I'm sure is going to be discussed in this thread, including vote receipts, coercion, verifiability that your vote is counted. Edit to add: And heres a good talk by Ben Adida speaking at Google for a "Theory and Practice of Cryptography" TechTalk series entitled "Verifying Elections with Crytography" from 2007. Good stuff there, too. link to this video
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grzmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers”

I think blockchain might have some application, but I'm unconvinced that computer technology alone is going to solve it. Have a look at this slide deck from Ron Rivest (of RSA fame). link I think he does a pretty good job of covering the history of modern voting and how technology can be properly applied. You might find this Google Tech Talk by Ben Adida "Verifying Elections with Cryptography" interesting as well: link to this video
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grzmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “E-Voting Refuses to Die Even Though It's Neither Secure nor Secret”

…de a great foundation for discussion. Here are some links I've found useful: Wikipedia page on End-to-End Auditable Voting Systems link Ron Rivest slide deck from March 2016. Auditability and Verifiability of Elections link Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007 Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography link to this video…
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grzmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Time to Take a Stand”

…o look into the work that's already out there. The 2000 election spurred a lot of research. Some good starting points are: Ronald L. Rivest MIT Auditability and Verifiability of Elections ACM-IEEE talk March 16, 2016 link --- Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007 Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography link to this video…
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bubblethinkon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Bounty Hunt Announced on Swiss eVoting System”

>The central issue with electronic voting is that it's opaque to observers. There was this interesting talk years ago. link to this video Does anyone in the space have a more up to date reference on where things are at ?
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u/tepkelin r/compsci • Mentions

On “Secure voting systems”

That part is actually technically quite doable. Just hard to do in an easily understandable way for the average voter. Which, imo, makes it a complete non-starter. Our voter registration rolls are public today. So there's already not anonymity on who voted. Just what their vote was for. You can have one encrypted vote per registered voter. Which is relatively straight forward to verify. Then use homomorphic addition. This is an interesting property of some encryption where multiplying ciphertext gives a new ciphertext that is the sum of the plaintext of the multiplied ciphertext terms. So, essentially you can count all the votes while everything is still encrypted, then decrypt just the res…
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Strilancon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Programmer under oath admits computers rig elections”

Verifying that the right binary was uploaded is solving the wrong problem. Who cares what the source code claims to do? We care about what it actually does. Real cryptographic voting systems use verifiable protocols. You don't trust the machine, you force it to follow a protocol that involves proving its actions are correct at every step. You can verify basically everything except destruction of information (i.e. there's no way to prove with cryptography that a video camera didn't record the voter). Video with an example of a verifiable voting protocol: link to this video
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kaoDon Hacker News • Mentions

On “V initiative – Building tomorrow’s secure digital democracy”

Why not use a non-bitcoin-based system and completely avoid the 51% attack? link to this video I'm not sure if this is state of the art0 since the talk is 7 years old. This scheme provides proof to the voter, but not enough so he can prove his vote to someone else, avoiding vote selling altogether. The biggest challenge IMHO is trust in the system. 0 I'd appreciate criticism or any other progress in the field.
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iwwron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Independent Report on E-voting in Estonia”

It's possible via homomorphic encryption, i.e. a way to manipulate cyphertext to make some mathematical operations like sums/products or logical comparisons without revealing the actual secrets. For example, it's possible to compare two encryptions of two numbers and get an encryption of their sum or to know which one is larger without knowing either. However one drawback of such a voting system would be an inability to get actual vote tallies, only an ordering of the candidates. There is an older google talk about this delving into more detail. link to this video
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Strilancon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US”

It entirely depends if it's using cryptography or not 1. For example, using zero knowledge proofs you can be given a receipt that lets you verify your vote was included in the total (without allowing you to prove to an attacker which party you voted for). Using the computers as glorified counters is a security nightmare. Using them for what they're good at (crypto) would be a security boon, with the main downside being how hard it would be for non-computer-scientists to understand the nature of the security. 1: link to this video
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