Blockchains and Bulletin Boards
Introduction Bulletin boards play a vital role in ensuring the integrity and verifiability of cryptographically secure voting systems. Acting as a centralized storage system, the bulletin board serves as a transparent platform where all public information related to the election is openly published, enabling anyone to scrutinise, assess, and audit the process. In the realm […]
Degree of Privacy in Voting
This article demonstrates the natural extension of Diaz’s 2002 degree of anonymity model to voting scenarios. The outcome is straightforward but holds potential value for intricate cases like weighted voting, where privacy concerns surpass the conventional “bisimilarity-under-swapping” definition outlined by Delaune in 2009. These concerns arise from the possibility of information leakage through election results, […]
A Toy Model of Information – Theoretic Security
In a previous post, we discussed different types of uncertainty due to limited information or computations as the basis for cryptography. A Caesar cipher example demonstrated how an adversary could have all the information to reveal a secret if the relationship between the message space, key space, and ciphertext satisfies the following: ZHOO GRQH […]
Anonymity, Pseudonymity and E-participation
In this article, we will examine two papers related to the topic of anonymity in e-participation: Ruesch & Märker 2012 – “Making the Case for Anonymity in E-Participation” and Moore 2016 – “Anonymity, Pseudonymity and Deliberation: Why Not Everything Should be Connected.” Our focus is on the concept that there may be an optimal solution […]
A bag of Dev Container Tricks
Nowadays, threre are a lot of tools, libraries, IDEs & plugins that are supposed to make the life of developers easier. But this also adds complexity. Moreover, it may make each developer’s development environment a bit different, depending on how the developer configured these tools. Dev Containers are yet another one of those tools, but they’re […]
Homomorphic vs Mixnet Based E-voting
Although proposals have been made using other techniques, most common modern approaches to constructing secure voting systems can be divided into two categories: those based on homomorphic tallying (shorthand “homomorphic systems”) and those based on verifiable mixnets (shortand “mixnet systems”). Most systems, both prototypes in academia as well as production systems in industry, use one […]
Bringing Sequent’s End-To-End Verifiable Voting Solution to the German Market
Based in Lueneburg, Germany, Electric Paper Informations Systeme (EPI) is a company that provides impactful solutions for the digitalization of the workplace and has been working in the field of tension between “people, paper and processes”. For over 20 years, they have contributed to the efficient conduct of internal elections across departmental and organizational boundaries. […]
Calling Go Code From Rust: A Google Trillian Story
The bulletin board and its requirements Although we have not officially announced any specific plan, it’s not a secret that at Sequent we’re developing our 2nd generation secure voting platform, because we work out there in the open. One of the most critical pieces of our 2nd-gen platform will be the bulletin board. In voting systems’ jargon, […]
A Universal Approach to Election Verification: An Opportunity for Increased Trust in Elections
Introduction A voting system is termed end-to-end verifiable (E2EVV) if it provides procedures to check that all steps of the voting process are executed correctly. These procedures include both human executed as well as automated software checks. Because the verifiability of end-to-end verifiable voting systems is based on mathematical proofs, the corresponding checks take the […]
Uncertainty, Cryptography and Information
This post will discuss three types of uncertainty and how they can be used to understand cryptography. According to Wikipedia, uncertainty refers to an incomplete and/or unknown piece of information. A prediction is an estimate of what will occur in the future, an estimate of what has already been measured or an estimate of […]