11 ms·

Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]

122 points by mdb333 10y ago

misterhtmlcss 10y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Glad someone is doing this, because the hope is obviously it'll massive increase the efforts anti-democratic individuals or orgs need to invest to determine the outcome of an election; which isn't all that high today.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  u wot m8. How much money could a collective of billionaires apply to a 51% attack? A 49% attack? Cheaper or more expensive than lobbying?
- ianstormtaylor 10y ago
  Do you have any evidence of it being easy to influence the outcome of the election? As far as I can tell there are a ton more exploits to be had, from less powerful (money, connections, etc.) people in an electronic system than in our current paper system. Right now the only individuals who have massive influence on an election are the candidates themselves (and maybe some specific people on their team). The next closest individuals are probably the extremely, extremely wealthy, and there aren't that many of them, and they don't even have as much power as you'd think.
bobbygoodlatte 10y ago
Not sure what this solves. I'm a huge proponent of Bitcoin/Blockchain, but how is this a better solution than say, one centralized national database? Blockchains are useful in situations where centralized trust can't be established or would be less valuable. If you can't trust the government that's running the election process, how would a blockchain solve that? Too many blockchain proposals just boil down to building a slow, expensive to maintain database.
- colordrops 10y ago
  Trust in the government is not a given. They must earn trust through public support, which is why propaganda and PR are such power government tools used to change what the public supports. With a blockchain, you don't have to trust the government at all, since it is public and very difficult to tamper with. If they do not comply with the outcome in the blockchain, the public outcry will cause severe upheaval. To not comply with less secure voting systems, they can just tamper with it to change the outcome.
  - Taek 10y ago
    You can fix that in other ways. Governments are inherently centralized. If you are voting, well that vote is meaningless without a government to enforce the results. There are cheaper ways to get transparency than a blockchain I think.
pedrocr 10y ago
Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up with various exploits to at least disrupt an election under these systems. Once you give me all this shiny new attack surface I can: - Hack the voting machines to just turn on the "duress" mode for everyone, or do it just in the precincts that tend to vote for my opponent - Use my great new paper receipt to prove I have voted for candidate A and collect my bribe as if the paper receipt doesn't encode the candidate it's useless. I don't care to verify if my vote was counted if I can't verify that it was counted for my candidate - Hack the voting machines to record candidates at random ignoring the key presses, turning the election into disarray - Selectively deny network access at polling places to create longer queues at the sites where my opponent is stronger I'm sure you can cause a riot or two pretty easily. The fact that paper is dumb and paper elections use extremely simple technology, math and process is a feature not a bug.
- barnacs 10y ago
  Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it. While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.
  - ianstormtaylor 10y ago
    Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!
badsock 10y ago
Looking at the "Voting Machine Security Specifications", it's a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day. This means that you have to trust the: * VPN * OS * Network stack * Display and input drivers (HW and SW) * SSD controller * CPU * CPU's "Management Engine" or equivalent * Mainboard chipset To all be free of exploits and backdoors. You're trusting many, many thousands of people, from hundreds of different companies in several different nations, to not have put backdoors in, despite the fact that backdoors and exploits have been discovered after the fact in essentially all of the listed components. I don't say this lightly: the authors are dangerous fools. They're fools to think that this is secure enough for an election. And they're dangerous because someone in power might believe them.
- munin 10y ago
  You don't have to trust them that much, though. These are all COTS components used in every other computerized system everywhere, so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention. That's pretty hard. How, for example, are you going to get a CPU bug to do this for you? I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's sort of like saying that we're fools for using gas-powered engines for the military. Thousands of people design them, so how do we know the designs haven't been sabotaged? You might be right, but you're probably wrong.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    > so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention. Except that many of the backdoors are universal backdoors, meaning that they can be remotely updated with new instructions.
    - munin 10y ago
      People still look for backdoors of that type, though. Additionally, if you really made something that specific, that was only ever discovered and used to hack an election, and the only people that could have done it were the chip vendor... how do you think that will play out when it's discovered? Or do you, as the attacker, bank on no one ever discovering this, ever? If you're an engineer working for one of these places, how much do you have to get paid, or what do you have to be threatened with, to make this work out? This seems much more like a novel written by Ian Fleming, not le Carre...
ClayFerguson 10y ago
I invented something like this myself that used a checksum based form of ensuring data can't be tampered with. The key point is that anyone can look up how it recorded THEIR vote without anyone else being able to. Uses a hash of social security number for that (plus other personal identifiers). Websites can be written to allow a simple form-based trivially simple gui that allows anyone to look up how their vote was recorded. There needs to be a way for people to post a 'protest' (saying vote was recorded wrong), and if there are statically enough disputes to change the outcome the election must be redone. But regardless blockchain or something using my checksum approach is the only solution. No paper chads or other technology will ever be trustworthy.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Pen & Paper will always be more trustworthy, transparent, and safe than any blockchain-bs. Part of the reason is that to compromise a paper ballot you need thousands of corrupt volunteers (and if you can find them, you have much bigger problems anyway). The other part of the argument is that the security isn't enough for a voting system. You need /obvious/ security, and a mathematical proof just isn't obvious enough. Also: ethereum. And your system probably suffers from allowing people to prove who they voted for.
  - ClayFerguson 10y ago
    With all due respect the only way you could claim blockchain is not safer than paper is if you don't understand blockchain. With a large database that is distributed on 1000s of different computers (identical DB), everyone is free to analyze what happen and tampering IS IMPOSSIBLE. Blockchain is the only technology that is indeed hack-proof. Sure it can be incorrectly implemented, making it hackable, but the technology itself IS secure. If it weren't then hackers could just attack BitCoin and program it to say they have more money than they do. If you understand BitCoin then you understand how this is impossible. Learn what a distributed ledger is.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      With all due respect, the only way you can claim a blockchain is more secure than paper ballots is if you... > Sure it can be incorrectly implemented ...ignore reality.
graiz 10y ago
I'm not sure about this specific approach. As other comments note, this is somewhat complex. That said there may be a few gem ideas. - Did my vote get counted? (can you prove it) - Did it get counted correctly? (can you prove it) - Can a vote be both traceable to the voter and anonymous publicly? The parallel to blockchain is simple. I get a "vote coin" that I can spend at the election. You can then see who has the most votes. The challenge to overcome in any block-chain approach is how to prevent votes from being bought and sold. If done correctly you don't have to trust the hardware to trust the election. If done correctly we could vote by phone.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  the biggest problem isn't buying and selling votes, its distribution of the votecoin. if you can get votea into the hands of legitimate voters, the rest falls into place.
  - graiz 10y ago
    That aspect wouldn't have to change from how it's done today. Go to your polling location and show/prove residency for registration purposes.
    - wheelerwj 10y ago
      then you don't need a blockchain. As a proponent of blockchain-based voting. we're not hitting the 10x better rule with this solution.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  My scheme tries to achieve all of that; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
partycoder 10y ago
How do you validate that each voter is real? What if the fraud moves to the voter registration?
aminok 10y ago
My blockchain-based voting proposal: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.10 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.10
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  Here's mine; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
known 10y ago
Cannot prevent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud when voters succumb to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
IncRnd 10y ago
There are many weaknesses in this system. The first clause of Design Considerations, "Although elegant and (thus far) invincible," shows a lack of understanding of currently possible and prior blockchain attacks. This protocol allows voting any Voter ID multiple times. There is a significant window of time until one of the blocks containing the Voter ID/ballot ID Hash is added to the block chain. During this time, all Voter IDs in the prospective block may be voted multiple times. This can occur by making a copy of a physical voter ID and simply using it twice at relatively the same time - just not on the same terminal. The exploitability chance increases as the number of votes per block increases. The blockchain plus the union of all unsent blocks for all terminals, not a local database, should be checked for who has voted. This is compounded by not checking when the blocks are added to the blockchain. Another issue with the local database, is that even if it is made to be a site database, many jurisdictions with early voting allow voters to vote anywhere, not just at their assigned voting location. The selected candidates are not signed properly with a voter's key. There is no assurance that a particular voter actually cast a vote for a specific candidate and not, say, "Mickey Mouse." This is actually one of the purposes of smart cards and similar. Beyond any protocol issues, this is the central purpose of any voting system, to ensure that when votes are cast the voter id is redacted but that that voter id's candidate selection can be validated! The Central Admin should release the list of the machine's public keys _prior_ to the election not _after_. There really are a lot of security issues with this security design. That being said, this paper is the winner of a cyber challenge here: http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-case-studies/cyber-security-case-study-competition-2016 http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-case-studies/cyber-sec...
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  I've got an MPC based proposal; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
udshu 10y ago
a real future voting system must work all time, on tons of simultaneous polls, be easily reachable by all world citizen via internet and must use p2p distributed technologies..
Kec71 10y ago
I think there is more important problem to fix if we are talking about democratic election. Programmer in video says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thcO_olHas&sns=fb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thcO_olHas&sns=fb
specialist 10y ago
I wish the cryptophiles would study how real world elections work before floating their ideas. Votebook proposes using a blockchain as a tamper evident (immutable) audit log. Because voters sign-in chronologically, recording votes in order removes the secret ballot. Votebook's proposal is to group up multiple into "blocks" and randomize the order within a block. Randomizing the order of the votes in an audit log would simulate the secure one-way hash of dropping your paper ballot into a ballot box. Poll sites are "bursty". During rush hour, lots of voters, so blocks will span small time windows. During midday, blocks will be large. 1 - How large must these blocks be to guard the secret ballot? Using some differential privacy mojo might determine they have to be 100 votes. I'm skeptical. It's problem even today with poll sites and postal ballots. Situations like small precincts or low turnout. In which case, Votebook is adding complexity without any real world benefit. 2 - What happens with the vote data as blocks are being built? So now this system has plaintext data in memory awaiting processing. Oops, power outage. Oops, software bug. 3 - Votebook does not solve the problem of properly, accurately recording the ballot as the voter cast it. 4 - Votebook will be cryto-based, necessitating further outsourcing our elections to vendors. 5 - I would never be able to explain how Votebook works to my mother (Jane average).
transfire 10y ago
I call B.S. on the excuse that it is expensive... Drop a few bombs in the Middle East (which we do routinely) and you've already spent more.
pm24601 10y ago
Background: I run a voting precinct in California and have for many years. Paper ballots are really the best for these reasons: 1) Fits human time frame. a large number of voters make up their mind incrementally. They take the mail ballot and mark the offices/measures that they know for certain on. Come election day they show up at the precinct with almost everything filled out. They then sit down and decide for everything else. 2) Does not require good eyesight. Older voters, younger voters, what ever - a simple magnifier can easily be used. We have them at the polling place. 3) Voter can vote on issues nonsequentially. Voting machines present the issues in the order they are on the ballot - not the order that the voter wants. 4) Speed of voting: if a voter knows how they are going to vote they can fly through a ballot in a couple of minutes. Voting on a voting machine takes a minimum of 6. Add in all the back and forth on the screens and it is frustrating for voters. 5) Ability to handle crushload of voters: If I have a lot of voters ready to vote: I put them anywhere in the room I have a seat, flat surface and a pen. With electronic voting machines I am limited to number of machines. 6) requires no training: everyone knows how to use a pen. Computer program... not so much. And I am not talking about tech sophistication. Anytime anyone uses a new program they have to slow down and make sure they understand what is being asked and what are the choices. 7) clarity of errors and error recovery: if a voter knows if they marked a ballot ( with a pen - not the chad Florida ballots) incorrectly. Error correction is easy. 8) No electricity is needed. Paper ballots always boot up correctly. ----------- Only reason for electronic voting is for sight impaired voters. And of the sight impaired voters, 100% seem to have solved the problem with mail in ballots OR bringing someone with them to the polling place. (In the 6 years i have run a precinct with upwards of ~2000 voters personally processed by me : about 6 have actually voted electronically) -------------- If you want to solve the real problem, based on my experience: 1) same day registration/automatic registration 2) easy voting at locations near transit. 3) easy access to mail-in ballots. 4) no electronic voting - much faster to process voters with paper. 5) allow people to vote out of precinct. (don't require people to get home - make it easier for them to vote near where they work)

122 points by mdb333 10y ago

I was thinking the same thing. Glad someone is doing this, because the hope is obviously it'll massive increase the efforts anti-democratic individuals or orgs need to invest to determine the outcome of an election; which isn't all that high today.

davidgerard 10y ago
u wot m8. How much money could a collective of billionaires apply to a 51% attack? A 49% attack? Cheaper or more expensive than lobbying?
ianstormtaylor 10y ago
Do you have any evidence of it being easy to influence the outcome of the election? As far as I can tell there are a ton more exploits to be had, from less powerful (money, connections, etc.) people in an electronic system than in our current paper system. Right now the only individuals who have massive influence on an election are the candidates themselves (and maybe some specific people on their team). The next closest individuals are probably the extremely, extremely wealthy, and there aren't that many of them, and they don't even have as much power as you'd think.

bobbygoodlatte 10y ago

Not sure what this solves. I'm a huge proponent of Bitcoin/Blockchain, but how is this a better solution than say, one centralized national database? Blockchains are useful in situations where centralized trust can't be established or would be less valuable. If you can't trust the government that's running the election process, how would a blockchain solve that? Too many blockchain proposals just boil down to building a slow, expensive to maintain database.

colordrops 10y ago
Trust in the government is not a given. They must earn trust through public support, which is why propaganda and PR are such power government tools used to change what the public supports. With a blockchain, you don't have to trust the government at all, since it is public and very difficult to tamper with. If they do not comply with the outcome in the blockchain, the public outcry will cause severe upheaval. To not comply with less secure voting systems, they can just tamper with it to change the outcome.
- Taek 10y ago
  You can fix that in other ways. Governments are inherently centralized. If you are voting, well that vote is meaningless without a government to enforce the results. There are cheaper ways to get transparency than a blockchain I think.

pedrocr 10y ago

Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up with various exploits to at least disrupt an election under these systems. Once you give me all this shiny new attack surface I can: - Hack the voting machines to just turn on the "duress" mode for everyone, or do it just in the precincts that tend to vote for my opponent - Use my great new paper receipt to prove I have voted for candidate A and collect my bribe as if the paper receipt doesn't encode the candidate it's useless. I don't care to verify if my vote was counted if I can't verify that it was counted for my candidate - Hack the voting machines to record candidates at random ignoring the key presses, turning the election into disarray - Selectively deny network access at polling places to create longer queues at the sites where my opponent is stronger I'm sure you can cause a riot or two pretty easily. The fact that paper is dumb and paper elections use extremely simple technology, math and process is a feature not a bug.

barnacs 10y ago
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it. While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.
- ianstormtaylor 10y ago
  Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!

badsock 10y ago

Looking at the "Voting Machine Security Specifications", it's a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day. This means that you have to trust the: * VPN * OS * Network stack * Display and input drivers (HW and SW) * SSD controller * CPU * CPU's "Management Engine" or equivalent * Mainboard chipset To all be free of exploits and backdoors. You're trusting many, many thousands of people, from hundreds of different companies in several different nations, to not have put backdoors in, despite the fact that backdoors and exploits have been discovered after the fact in essentially all of the listed components. I don't say this lightly: the authors are dangerous fools. They're fools to think that this is secure enough for an election. And they're dangerous because someone in power might believe them.

munin 10y ago
You don't have to trust them that much, though. These are all COTS components used in every other computerized system everywhere, so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention. That's pretty hard. How, for example, are you going to get a CPU bug to do this for you? I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's sort of like saying that we're fools for using gas-powered engines for the military. Thousands of people design them, so how do we know the designs haven't been sabotaged? You might be right, but you're probably wrong.
- cyphar 10y ago
  > so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention. Except that many of the backdoors are universal backdoors, meaning that they can be remotely updated with new instructions.
  - munin 10y ago
    People still look for backdoors of that type, though. Additionally, if you really made something that specific, that was only ever discovered and used to hack an election, and the only people that could have done it were the chip vendor... how do you think that will play out when it's discovered? Or do you, as the attacker, bank on no one ever discovering this, ever? If you're an engineer working for one of these places, how much do you have to get paid, or what do you have to be threatened with, to make this work out? This seems much more like a novel written by Ian Fleming, not le Carre...

ClayFerguson 10y ago

I invented something like this myself that used a checksum based form of ensuring data can't be tampered with. The key point is that anyone can look up how it recorded THEIR vote without anyone else being able to. Uses a hash of social security number for that (plus other personal identifiers). Websites can be written to allow a simple form-based trivially simple gui that allows anyone to look up how their vote was recorded. There needs to be a way for people to post a 'protest' (saying vote was recorded wrong), and if there are statically enough disputes to change the outcome the election must be redone. But regardless blockchain or something using my checksum approach is the only solution. No paper chads or other technology will ever be trustworthy.

matt4077 10y ago
Pen & Paper will always be more trustworthy, transparent, and safe than any blockchain-bs. Part of the reason is that to compromise a paper ballot you need thousands of corrupt volunteers (and if you can find them, you have much bigger problems anyway). The other part of the argument is that the security isn't enough for a voting system. You need /obvious/ security, and a mathematical proof just isn't obvious enough. Also: ethereum. And your system probably suffers from allowing people to prove who they voted for.
- ClayFerguson 10y ago
  With all due respect the only way you could claim blockchain is not safer than paper is if you don't understand blockchain. With a large database that is distributed on 1000s of different computers (identical DB), everyone is free to analyze what happen and tampering IS IMPOSSIBLE. Blockchain is the only technology that is indeed hack-proof. Sure it can be incorrectly implemented, making it hackable, but the technology itself IS secure. If it weren't then hackers could just attack BitCoin and program it to say they have more money than they do. If you understand BitCoin then you understand how this is impossible. Learn what a distributed ledger is.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    With all due respect, the only way you can claim a blockchain is more secure than paper ballots is if you... > Sure it can be incorrectly implemented ...ignore reality.

graiz 10y ago

I'm not sure about this specific approach. As other comments note, this is somewhat complex. That said there may be a few gem ideas. - Did my vote get counted? (can you prove it) - Did it get counted correctly? (can you prove it) - Can a vote be both traceable to the voter and anonymous publicly? The parallel to blockchain is simple. I get a "vote coin" that I can spend at the election. You can then see who has the most votes. The challenge to overcome in any block-chain approach is how to prevent votes from being bought and sold. If done correctly you don't have to trust the hardware to trust the election. If done correctly we could vote by phone.

wheelerwj 10y ago
the biggest problem isn't buying and selling votes, its distribution of the votecoin. if you can get votea into the hands of legitimate voters, the rest falls into place.
- graiz 10y ago
  That aspect wouldn't have to change from how it's done today. Go to your polling location and show/prove residency for registration purposes.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    then you don't need a blockchain. As a proponent of blockchain-based voting. we're not hitting the 10x better rule with this solution.
Natanael_L 10y ago
My scheme tries to achieve all of that; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

partycoder 10y ago

How do you validate that each voter is real? What if the fraud moves to the voter registration?

aminok 10y ago

My blockchain-based voting proposal: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.10 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=413196.10

Natanael_L 10y ago
Here's mine; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

known 10y ago

Cannot prevent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud when voters succumb to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

IncRnd 10y ago

There are many weaknesses in this system. The first clause of Design Considerations, "Although elegant and (thus far) invincible," shows a lack of understanding of currently possible and prior blockchain attacks. This protocol allows voting any Voter ID multiple times. There is a significant window of time until one of the blocks containing the Voter ID/ballot ID Hash is added to the block chain. During this time, all Voter IDs in the prospective block may be voted multiple times. This can occur by making a copy of a physical voter ID and simply using it twice at relatively the same time - just not on the same terminal. The exploitability chance increases as the number of votes per block increases. The blockchain plus the union of all unsent blocks for all terminals, not a local database, should be checked for who has voted. This is compounded by not checking when the blocks are added to the blockchain. Another issue with the local database, is that even if it is made to be a site database, many jurisdictions with early voting allow voters to vote anywhere, not just at their assigned voting location. The selected candidates are not signed properly with a voter's key. There is no assurance that a particular voter actually cast a vote for a specific candidate and not, say, "Mickey Mouse." This is actually one of the purposes of smart cards and similar. Beyond any protocol issues, this is the central purpose of any voting system, to ensure that when votes are cast the voter id is redacted but that that voter id's candidate selection can be validated! The Central Admin should release the list of the machine's public keys _prior_ to the election not _after_. There really are a lot of security issues with this security design. That being said, this paper is the winner of a cyber challenge here: http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-case-studies/cyber-security-case-study-competition-2016 http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-case-studies/cyber-sec...

Natanael_L 10y ago
I've got an MPC based proposal; https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mpc-based-privacy-preserving-flexible-cryptographic-voting-scheme/ https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

udshu 10y ago

a real future voting system must work all time, on tons of simultaneous polls, be easily reachable by all world citizen via internet and must use p2p distributed technologies..

Kec71 10y ago

I think there is more important problem to fix if we are talking about democratic election. Programmer in video says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thcO_olHas&sns=fb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thcO_olHas&sns=fb

specialist 10y ago

I wish the cryptophiles would study how real world elections work before floating their ideas. Votebook proposes using a blockchain as a tamper evident (immutable) audit log. Because voters sign-in chronologically, recording votes in order removes the secret ballot. Votebook's proposal is to group up multiple into "blocks" and randomize the order within a block. Randomizing the order of the votes in an audit log would simulate the secure one-way hash of dropping your paper ballot into a ballot box. Poll sites are "bursty". During rush hour, lots of voters, so blocks will span small time windows. During midday, blocks will be large. 1 - How large must these blocks be to guard the secret ballot? Using some differential privacy mojo might determine they have to be 100 votes. I'm skeptical. It's problem even today with poll sites and postal ballots. Situations like small precincts or low turnout. In which case, Votebook is adding complexity without any real world benefit. 2 - What happens with the vote data as blocks are being built? So now this system has plaintext data in memory awaiting processing. Oops, power outage. Oops, software bug. 3 - Votebook does not solve the problem of properly, accurately recording the ballot as the voter cast it. 4 - Votebook will be cryto-based, necessitating further outsourcing our elections to vendors. 5 - I would never be able to explain how Votebook works to my mother (Jane average).

transfire 10y ago

I call B.S. on the excuse that it is expensive... Drop a few bombs in the Middle East (which we do routinely) and you've already spent more.

pm24601 10y ago

Background: I run a voting precinct in California and have for many years. Paper ballots are really the best for these reasons: 1) Fits human time frame. a large number of voters make up their mind incrementally. They take the mail ballot and mark the offices/measures that they know for certain on. Come election day they show up at the precinct with almost everything filled out. They then sit down and decide for everything else. 2) Does not require good eyesight. Older voters, younger voters, what ever - a simple magnifier can easily be used. We have them at the polling place. 3) Voter can vote on issues nonsequentially. Voting machines present the issues in the order they are on the ballot - not the order that the voter wants. 4) Speed of voting: if a voter knows how they are going to vote they can fly through a ballot in a couple of minutes. Voting on a voting machine takes a minimum of 6. Add in all the back and forth on the screens and it is frustrating for voters. 5) Ability to handle crushload of voters: If I have a lot of voters ready to vote: I put them anywhere in the room I have a seat, flat surface and a pen. With electronic voting machines I am limited to number of machines. 6) requires no training: everyone knows how to use a pen. Computer program... not so much. And I am not talking about tech sophistication. Anytime anyone uses a new program they have to slow down and make sure they understand what is being asked and what are the choices. 7) clarity of errors and error recovery: if a voter knows if they marked a ballot ( with a pen - not the chad Florida ballots) incorrectly. Error correction is easy. 8) No electricity is needed. Paper ballots always boot up correctly. ----------- Only reason for electronic voting is for sight impaired voters. And of the sight impaired voters, 100% seem to have solved the problem with mail in ballots OR bringing someone with them to the polling place. (In the 6 years i have run a precinct with upwards of ~2000 voters personally processed by me : about 6 have actually voted electronically) -------------- If you want to solve the real problem, based on my experience: 1) same day registration/automatic registration 2) easy voting at locations near transit. 3) easy access to mail-in ballots. 4) no electronic voting - much faster to process voters with paper. 5) allow people to vote out of precinct. (don't require people to get home - make it easier for them to vote near where they work)