Viewing profile — mspecter

Also, I'm just the professor, the grad students on it are the real heroes: Akshaya Kumar [1] and Anna Raymaker [2]. [1] https://akumar805.github.io/ [2] https://annaraymaker.dad/

Interesting! Hadn't heard of it.

In general, yes! We did some follow on work explaining how all of this works, depending on the provider: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0113.pdf

Last author on the paper here ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00350 ). Happy to answer any questions!

Good point. Most of this was written before the signal-custom-client thing happened, so it wasn't top of mind. We also considered "serious" systems, deployed en masse. Perhaps we s…

Oh, I didn't realize it'd made it to Schneier's blog, thanks for letting me know! A goal of the work was to try to explain to a new audience (specifically nontechnical legal folks)…

Coauthor here, somewhat surprised to see this on HN. Any thoughts, questions, or feedback welcome.

The secret ballot is usually considered a core goal of an elections system, blockchain involvement or not.

I have not personally, but there's some fantastic work on the subject: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9152765?signou... They find a few really bad issues. IIRC, the …

You might be interested in some prior work on blockchain voting, it's a bit harder to get right than one might think, and actually introduces some problems [1,2]. [1] https://www.u…

Hey all, coauthor here. Interesting to see it on Hacker News. I'm a professor in Georgia Tech's CS dept that works on problems related to security, privacy, and public policy. (CV:…

Hi! Check out our Usenix 2021 paper on exactly this topic. The key insight is to release private keys over time: http://www.mit.edu/~specter/blog/2020/dkim/

To push this further, I was working on a research paper with Ron Rivest, Neha Narula (head of MIT's decentralized currency initiative), and Sunoo Park (a wonderful applied cryptogr…

> How confident are you that we could reach a well engineered and proofed electronic voting platform that also adheres to theoretical rules around vote security? I don't think we c…

To put this in short-hand: "We bank online, we buy all sorts of stuff online, why not vote?" The biggest reason is that banking and other financial transactions have a very differe…

That's a wonderful question. The honest answer is that I have no idea. In the version we reverse engineered, there's no proof of inclusion of any of the data in the blockchain in t…

Oh, hi. I'm Mike Specter, lead author on the MIT report [1], and have been involved in other voting-related research projects [2,3]. LMK if you all have any questions! 1. https://i…

Hijacking this to say that we need the following: 1. Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs)[1] 2. Software independence [2] 3. Paper-backed ballots (which are the official record of the vote)…

Yep! https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/ I'm in his group at MIT.

Sure, though, to be pedantic, a common example of moral hazard is the increased likelihood of driving recklessly in the presence of mandatory seat belts. See https://web.stanford.e…