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Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

docs.voteism.org

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Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#31

Post by votes »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #23
votes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encrypted data along with the signature of the encrypted vote is written to the bigquery table (and not directly to the air-gapped server) which is written to another temp folder (only the account that has access permissions can write to this folder) before being downloaded and processed on air-gapped server. The malicious server will not be directly able to write to the air-gapped server.

"The encrypted data along with the signature of the encrypted vote is written to the bigquery table (and not directly to the air-gapped server) which is written to another temp folder (only the account that has access permissions can write to this folder) before being downloaded and processed on air-gapped server." No, you say it is. From the client's side, all I do is POST my encrypted vote and signature ( https://g…

Thanks for commenting. If you are concerned that our signature is over candidate name or ID, we don't do that. We sign the encrypted vote and not the plain text. We verify it on the air-gapped system.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#32

Post by maccam94 »

bobmaxup wrote: post #22
arkadiyt wrote: post #20

> We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future. There is unanimous agreement from the security community that we must not use digital voting. It is a mistake, full stop. As an opinion app it doesn't matter, but we must use paper ballots for our elections. For anyone intere…

Unanimous? That seems extremely unlikely, no?

It is fundamentally impossible to have secret ballots[1] in a digital system along with provable integrity. Secret ballots are necessary to prevent vote buying, intimidation, and coercion. If no one can prove which voter submitted which ballot, nor what choices a voter indicated, the voter is free to choose without risk of repercussions. The breakdown of any digital voting system is always with verification.

With paper, the voter can see that their ballot is securely stored under the supervision of the election operators, and they can see that representatives from multiple parties watch the movement and counting of the ballots.

In contrast, with a digital system it is impossible to verify that your ballot was delivered with the choices you intended without also being able to show that proof to anyone else. It is important that the voter is unable to show proof of their vote for the reasons mentioned above. Unlike a paper-based process, you cannot directly observe the functioning of an electronic circuit, the transmission of data over cables, or the storage of bytes in memory, and neither can anyone else trying to verify the integrity of the process. You'll never know if someone has replaced any of the hardware or software components with malicious versions designed to fool voters and rig elections.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#34

Post by alexmingoia »

You might find it valuable to read “So you want to reform democracy?” https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-... by the founder of GovTrack. There is a lot of prior art in this area.

PlaceAVote was one of many startups that tried this, monetized by selling the data to pollsters. They had quite a few users at one point.

https://countable.us lets people vote and discuss real bills and issues, I think also monetized by poll data and ads.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#35

Post by ShorsHammer »

arkadiyt wrote: post #20

> We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future. There is unanimous agreement from the security community that we must not use digital voting. It is a mistake, full stop. As an opinion app it doesn't matter, but we must use paper ballots for our elections. For anyone intere…

While you are right and certainly most if not all prominent infosec people would be highly sceptical of any online voting I really don't think that's a reason to dissuade people from trying.

It's utterly absurd to say everyone should just give up and we will only use paper for the next 500 years. People should be attempting secure online voting and kneejerk pessimism or shutting down discussion on it is counter-productive.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#36

Post by ShorsHammer »

maccam94 wrote: post #32
bobmaxup wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unanimous? That seems extremely unlikely, no?

It is fundamentally impossible to have secret ballots[1] in a digital system along with provable integrity. Secret ballots are necessary to prevent vote buying, intimidation, and coercion. If no one can prove which voter submitted which ballot, nor what choices a voter indicated, the voter is free to choose without risk of repercussions. The breakdown of any digital voting system is always with verification. With pap…

I can prove the existence of X with zero-knowledge proofs without exposing X. Obviously there's more from there for elections but the cryptographic groundwork certainly exists.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#37

Post by jobigoud »

ShorsHammer wrote: post #36
maccam94 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fundamentally impossible to have secret ballots[1] in a digital system along with provable integrity. Secret ballots are necessary to prevent vote buying, intimidation, and coercion. If no one can prove which voter submitted which ballot, nor what choices a voter indicated, the voter is free to choose without risk of repercussions. The breakdown of any digital voting system is always with verification. With pap…

I can prove the existence of X with zero-knowledge proofs without exposing X. Obviously there's more from there for elections but the cryptographic groundwork certainly exists.

But unlike the paper mechanism, the average person, nor the experts for that matter, can verify the correct and uncompromised implementation of the zero knowledge algorithm. You trade off the understandability and verifiability of the scheme.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#38

Post by jobigoud »

jeffrallen wrote: post #25
bobmaxup wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unanimous? That seems extremely unlikely, no?

I work in Switzerland on evoting issues and I disagree with that reply, so by definition opinion is not unanimous. End to end verifiable voting systems work. The devil is in the (operational details) but societies which wasn't evoting can have it if they read the research (or cheat and just take Switzerland's law).

Verifiable by the voters themselves or on theoretic level?

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#39

Post by kaffeeringe »

As far as I know Constanze Kurz of Germany's Chaos Computer Club wrote her doctor thesis about eVoting and proved that it's only possible if you abandon secret vote. If your voting system is a black box to most people, they have to see the result. Not only their result but everyone's result to be able to prove it's correct and the sums are also correct.

Re: Show HN: VOTEism – Secure political opinion poll app

#40

Post by schwartzworld »

ShorsHammer wrote: post #35
arkadiyt wrote: post #20

> We wondered what it would be like to conduct democratic elections online. While that is the far-far future, we set about building something that could get us a step closer towards that future. There is unanimous agreement from the security community that we must not use digital voting. It is a mistake, full stop. As an opinion app it doesn't matter, but we must use paper ballots for our elections. For anyone intere…

While you are right and certainly most if not all prominent infosec people would be highly sceptical of any online voting I really don't think that's a reason to dissuade people from trying. It's utterly absurd to say everyone should just give up and we will only use paper for the next 500 years. People should be attempting secure online voting and kneejerk pessimism or shutting down discussion on it is counter-produ…

paper has tremendous advantages over online. why is it absurd to want to embrace those rather than shoehorn ourselves into a more gameable system?
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