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Homomorphic encryption

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Re: Homomorphic encryption

#21

Post by irrational »

dark_glass wrote: post #19
rfugger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting: https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil... The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against…

I don't think that is a major problem, unless I am misunderstanding. Oregon for instance is all vote by mail, outside the watchful eye of any government authority.

What do you mean by "outside the watchful eye of any government authority"?

Do you just mean the ballots are filled out at home where a government authority is not looking over my shoulder? Because everything else is controlled by the government. The ballots and booklets are printed by the government (who authorize what can be on the ballot and in the booklet), are mailed by a government agency, are checked by a government authority, etc.

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#22

Post by api »

Iv wrote: post #3

Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.

It promises more than that. If we could actually have fast homomorphic execution we could have blind cloud computing.

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#24

Post by gnarula94 »

solidasparagus wrote: post #8
Iv wrote: post #3

Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.

How does computation on encrypted data relate to voting systems?

Homomorphic encryption would allow tallying the ballots without decrypting them.

Helios [1], for instance uses an homomorphic scheme.

There are alternatives to it though which preserve voter privacy but allow vote tallying. Shuffling is one of them. Cothority [2] implements an e-voting scheme based on Neff Shuffles

1. https://heliosvoting.org/ 2. https://github.com/dedis/cothority/tree/master/evoting

P.S. I contributed to the latter

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#25

Post by the8472 »

api wrote: post #22
Iv wrote: post #3

Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.

It promises more than that. If we could actually have fast homomorphic execution we could have blind cloud computing.

It also means undebuggable black box computations running on your machine (DRM, javascript).

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#26

Post by kosievdmerwe »

irrational wrote: post #21
dark_glass wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is a major problem, unless I am misunderstanding. Oregon for instance is all vote by mail, outside the watchful eye of any government authority.

What do you mean by "outside the watchful eye of any government authority"? Do you just mean the ballots are filled out at home where a government authority is not looking over my shoulder? Because everything else is controlled by the government. The ballots and booklets are printed by the government (who authorize what can be on the ballot and in the booklet), are mailed by a government agency, are checked by a gove…

It's hard to look over someone's shoulder to make sure they're making the "right" vote if they're in a public voting booth.

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#27

Post by monocasa »

compsciphd wrote: post #18
crdrost wrote: post #10

To address the inevitable “what is this useful for” questions, my go-to example is cryptographic voting mechanisms. The idea is that you segment a large integer into a couple of different bins by its bitwise representation. So you have a 60-bit integer and you segment it into four 15-bit bins. You use one of those to randomize what the encrypted versions are going to be, and you use the other three for different vote…

I'd think there's a simpler way to accomplish what you said above (though in both cases, any voting mechanism that lets the voter verify their vote after the fact also runs into the problem of people complaining about encouraging vote buying). i.e. imagine every polling place would output to you (after you voted) a random number in the 128 bit space. the votes are recorded with this random number. we can verify after…

You open yourself to vote buying and voter cohersion attacks, historically the most common voting fraud mechanism in the states.

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#28

Post by jhayward »

dark_glass wrote: post #19
rfugger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting: https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil... The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against…

I don't think that is a major problem, unless I am misunderstanding. Oregon for instance is all vote by mail, outside the watchful eye of any government authority.

I hope not.

https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/state/executive/elect...

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#29

Post by jayd16 »

crdrost wrote: post #10

To address the inevitable “what is this useful for” questions, my go-to example is cryptographic voting mechanisms. The idea is that you segment a large integer into a couple of different bins by its bitwise representation. So you have a 60-bit integer and you segment it into four 15-bit bins. You use one of those to randomize what the encrypted versions are going to be, and you use the other three for different vote…

So conceptually, I get sent a locked voting box, I slip my vote in, return the box. No one can open the box until the election and nothing is identifiable about the tallies at the end. Ok...

What is stopping me from putting in multiple votes?

Whats stopping someone from checking my single vote difference? (ie, skipping the anonymization through aggregation part)

Re: Homomorphic encryption

#30

Post by crdrost »

compsciphd wrote: post #18
crdrost wrote: post #10

To address the inevitable “what is this useful for” questions, my go-to example is cryptographic voting mechanisms. The idea is that you segment a large integer into a couple of different bins by its bitwise representation. So you have a 60-bit integer and you segment it into four 15-bit bins. You use one of those to randomize what the encrypted versions are going to be, and you use the other three for different vote…

I'd think there's a simpler way to accomplish what you said above (though in both cases, any voting mechanism that lets the voter verify their vote after the fact also runs into the problem of people complaining about encouraging vote buying). i.e. imagine every polling place would output to you (after you voted) a random number in the 128 bit space. the votes are recorded with this random number. we can verify after…

Well, no, if you do it cryptographically, at least with the proper mechanism, you can prevent votes from being buyable. In your case, if someone wants to buy your vote, they can ask you to text the number to them before it has appeared as a matter of public record—and if you voted for the Right Person they will pay you. The 128-bit number makes this very hard to forge, whereas to destroy vote-buying you want to make something very easy to forge.

Suppose that you receive a ballot from a machine which tears it down the middle: on the right hand side are bar codes containing the voting numbers; on the left-hand-side are candidates' metadata—names, parties, etc. So from the very moment I hand you the ballot, you can see that there is a connection between these numbers and those names, but as long as I provide a supply of other left-hand-sides in other orders, it becomes very easy for you to fake it when displaying it to someone else. That ease-of-forgery is the key to making it impossible to buy votes.

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