4 ms·

Cicada: Private on-chain voting using time-lock puzzles

44 points by subsequent 3y ago

jl2718 3y ago
Meanwhile in academia, I’ve proposed research into cryptographically-provable voting systems, and received nothing but hostility and discouragement. The same cryptography professors who started their careers in the topic after the 2000 election, have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity.
- vitno 3y ago
  How much of that is because we have a bunch of forward secret e2e auditable ballot schemes already? (E.g. ThreeBallot) We already know how to do this, it's policy that the hard part at this point from my understanding.
  - ericpauley 3y ago
    Yup. Voting has received a dizzying amount of academic research. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to innovate, but diving into that field without an advisor that’s familiar is a recipe for years of rediscovering existing results.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    Also there's was a lot of over enthusiasm about moving voting to remote and online that took a while to get people to realize the major pitfalls they were setting up. Did anyone ever solve the issue of vote verification (a voter being able to verify that their vote was counted) being a massive threat to vote secrecy? ie they're threatened to vote for Candidate X by a group and forced to show a verification they did?
    - Zamiel_Snawley 3y ago
      Yes [0][1]. [0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/evtwote13/jets-0101-bell.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/evtwote13/jet... [1] https://youtu.be/Cl8q_356zZs?t=3013 https://youtu.be/Cl8q_356zZs?t=3013
- wanderingbit 3y ago
  I’m not sure why the academics are discouraged , but there are non-technical reasons to discourage you (and all of us) from trying to use Internet-based voting systems for important elections: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill-why-online-voting-danger-democracy https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill... This article voices the general opinion I’ve read from technologists and those who’ve studied networked voting systems. The problems all boil down to any software-based (i.e. non-paper-based) voting system will almost certainly contain bugs, and this will allow elections to be influenced by a few persistent hackers. Maybe this is where blockchain-based systems could help push such systems forward, by effectively giving a worldwide bounty for voting software. After many years and 0 hacks, we could be pretty confident that this particular piece of solidity code is solid and could be used as part of an Internet voting scheme. Though, the moment you have a frontend (which you will of course need to interact with the smart contract) you’re back to square one because of all the millions of lines of code (uh oh, bugs!) that are necessary to be executed in order to display a form on your screen. Maybe it’s a good thing you were discouraged from this bleak area of research, who knows. I’m sorry you were discouraged like that.
  - jl2718 3y ago
    This is an extremely weak straw-man argument. It doesn’t need to be on the blockchain, mobile, or even the internet. You can print out the cryptographic proof on paper if it pleases you.
    - mkj 3y ago
      How many scrutineers would be able to verify that paper? Let alone normal voters. (Scrutineer might be a poll-watcher in the US?)
      - nailer 3y ago
        I imagine anyone who runs the mobile app could probably open the camera and scan it.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Blockchain techbros have thoroughly burned up the good will that society grants new technologies, and earned it a distrust until proven otherwise state. There's even an XKCD on this exact topic: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ >have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity. Seeing as how disinformation is a gigantic problem these days, this is a better use of their time than trying to reinvent a wheel that already works. Implementing a transparent verifiable blockchain backed voting system will not reduce election fraud conspiracy theories because those belief systems were not arrived at through rational logic in the first place.
  - jl2718 3y ago
    Until it’s a result you don’t like. Have you ever considered the possibility that there are places where election systems can’t be trusted? I’m sure you’ll be just as supportive of the Russian-led vote in occupied regions of Ukraine. My proposal was for provable voting systems in conflict regions. It stems from my experience on the ground supporting the 2014 election in Afghanistan. People all over the world risk their lives to vote, and they, normal primitive farmers with no education, demand proof that it was done fairly. The current method is a line of people showing their hands, then one by one, marking a wall and walking out with purple thumbs. But really, the place and the situation is irrelevant. I find your response both abhorrent and stereotypical.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - gaganyaan 3y ago
      And you think an uneducated rural farmer is going to trust some numbers you show them? If they think the election is unfair, you going on about blockchain this and zero knowledge proof that is just going to convince them that you're making shit up in order to support a stolen election. The purple thumb proof works way better there. The academics are right and you're wasting your time, sorry.
      - 3y ago
zeryx 3y ago
Something we were pretty worried about, not every kind of vote needs privacy - but there was a story with Eth DAO having people like Vitalik abstain from voting to not affect other voters opinions, happy to see further progress in this area. Can't wait for an openzepplin primitive.
keyle 3y ago
Time lock puzzle, is that a fancy way of saying proof of work?
- api 3y ago
  It’s like that but usually to decrypt something where the output of a verifiable delay function is a key.
  - MaxikCZ 3y ago
    are there other verifiable delay functions than essentially just proof of work opinionated about hardware capabilities?
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  It's a fancy way of saying magic beans.
- mitchellpkt 3y ago
  They’re fundamentally different since the standard definition of a VDF is strictly non-parallelizable and P/o/W is generally designed to be “embarrassingly parallel.” It may seem like a minor subtlety but the resulting dynamics are dramatically different. For a VDF it doesn’t matter if you have 1 machine churning away or 1000 machines churning away, it will take you the same amount of time to finish the calculation.
blueprint 3y ago
there are some who say that the following and other work is superior to cicada which eg requires timelocks https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/543 https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/543
endianswap 3y ago
My confidence in the accuracy of this article diminished once I read this bit: > As such, it is only suitable if the expected final tally is reasonably small (e.g. less than 2^32, or about 4.3 million votes).
- nailer 3y ago
  It also uses 1024 bit RSA and on Eth which is one of the slowest and most expensive L1s.
kemotep 3y ago
For a personal project or a team of professionals that understand how public key cryptography works this is a, albeit expensive, solution for a cryptographically proven voting system. For an election system that a government would use? Absolutely right out. A criteria for fair elections is that the average person needs to be able grok it. The number of people who can validate solidity smart contracts and the cryptographic integrity of a blockchain is astronomically small compared to a paper ballot based system.

44 points by subsequent 3y ago

Meanwhile in academia, I’ve proposed research into cryptographically-provable voting systems, and received nothing but hostility and discouragement. The same cryptography professors who started their careers in the topic after the 2000 election, have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity.

vitno 3y ago
How much of that is because we have a bunch of forward secret e2e auditable ballot schemes already? (E.g. ThreeBallot) We already know how to do this, it's policy that the hard part at this point from my understanding.
- ericpauley 3y ago
  Yup. Voting has received a dizzying amount of academic research. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to innovate, but diving into that field without an advisor that’s familiar is a recipe for years of rediscovering existing results.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  Also there's was a lot of over enthusiasm about moving voting to remote and online that took a while to get people to realize the major pitfalls they were setting up. Did anyone ever solve the issue of vote verification (a voter being able to verify that their vote was counted) being a massive threat to vote secrecy? ie they're threatened to vote for Candidate X by a group and forced to show a verification they did?
  - Zamiel_Snawley 3y ago
    Yes [0][1]. [0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/evtwote13/jets-0101-bell.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/evtwote13/jet... [1] https://youtu.be/Cl8q_356zZs?t=3013 https://youtu.be/Cl8q_356zZs?t=3013
wanderingbit 3y ago
I’m not sure why the academics are discouraged , but there are non-technical reasons to discourage you (and all of us) from trying to use Internet-based voting systems for important elections: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill-why-online-voting-danger-democracy https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/david-dill... This article voices the general opinion I’ve read from technologists and those who’ve studied networked voting systems. The problems all boil down to any software-based (i.e. non-paper-based) voting system will almost certainly contain bugs, and this will allow elections to be influenced by a few persistent hackers. Maybe this is where blockchain-based systems could help push such systems forward, by effectively giving a worldwide bounty for voting software. After many years and 0 hacks, we could be pretty confident that this particular piece of solidity code is solid and could be used as part of an Internet voting scheme. Though, the moment you have a frontend (which you will of course need to interact with the smart contract) you’re back to square one because of all the millions of lines of code (uh oh, bugs!) that are necessary to be executed in order to display a form on your screen. Maybe it’s a good thing you were discouraged from this bleak area of research, who knows. I’m sorry you were discouraged like that.
- jl2718 3y ago
  This is an extremely weak straw-man argument. It doesn’t need to be on the blockchain, mobile, or even the internet. You can print out the cryptographic proof on paper if it pleases you.
  - mkj 3y ago
    How many scrutineers would be able to verify that paper? Let alone normal voters. (Scrutineer might be a poll-watcher in the US?)
    - nailer 3y ago
      I imagine anyone who runs the mobile app could probably open the camera and scan it.
flangola7 3y ago
Blockchain techbros have thoroughly burned up the good will that society grants new technologies, and earned it a distrust until proven otherwise state. There's even an XKCD on this exact topic: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ >have now changed their research interest to ‘combatting disinformation’ about election integrity. Seeing as how disinformation is a gigantic problem these days, this is a better use of their time than trying to reinvent a wheel that already works. Implementing a transparent verifiable blockchain backed voting system will not reduce election fraud conspiracy theories because those belief systems were not arrived at through rational logic in the first place.
- jl2718 3y ago
  Until it’s a result you don’t like. Have you ever considered the possibility that there are places where election systems can’t be trusted? I’m sure you’ll be just as supportive of the Russian-led vote in occupied regions of Ukraine. My proposal was for provable voting systems in conflict regions. It stems from my experience on the ground supporting the 2014 election in Afghanistan. People all over the world risk their lives to vote, and they, normal primitive farmers with no education, demand proof that it was done fairly. The current method is a line of people showing their hands, then one by one, marking a wall and walking out with purple thumbs. But really, the place and the situation is irrelevant. I find your response both abhorrent and stereotypical.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    And you think an uneducated rural farmer is going to trust some numbers you show them? If they think the election is unfair, you going on about blockchain this and zero knowledge proof that is just going to convince them that you're making shit up in order to support a stolen election. The purple thumb proof works way better there. The academics are right and you're wasting your time, sorry.
    - 3y ago

zeryx 3y ago

Something we were pretty worried about, not every kind of vote needs privacy - but there was a story with Eth DAO having people like Vitalik abstain from voting to not affect other voters opinions, happy to see further progress in this area. Can't wait for an openzepplin primitive.

keyle 3y ago

Time lock puzzle, is that a fancy way of saying proof of work?

api 3y ago
It’s like that but usually to decrypt something where the output of a verifiable delay function is a key.
- MaxikCZ 3y ago
  are there other verifiable delay functions than essentially just proof of work opinionated about hardware capabilities?
sdfghswe 3y ago
It's a fancy way of saying magic beans.
mitchellpkt 3y ago
They’re fundamentally different since the standard definition of a VDF is strictly non-parallelizable and P/o/W is generally designed to be “embarrassingly parallel.” It may seem like a minor subtlety but the resulting dynamics are dramatically different. For a VDF it doesn’t matter if you have 1 machine churning away or 1000 machines churning away, it will take you the same amount of time to finish the calculation.

blueprint 3y ago

there are some who say that the following and other work is superior to cicada which eg requires timelocks https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/543 https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/543

endianswap 3y ago

My confidence in the accuracy of this article diminished once I read this bit: > As such, it is only suitable if the expected final tally is reasonably small (e.g. less than 2^32, or about 4.3 million votes).

nailer 3y ago
It also uses 1024 bit RSA and on Eth which is one of the slowest and most expensive L1s.

kemotep 3y ago

For a personal project or a team of professionals that understand how public key cryptography works this is a, albeit expensive, solution for a cryptographically proven voting system. For an election system that a government would use? Absolutely right out. A criteria for fair elections is that the average person needs to be able grok it. The number of people who can validate solidity smart contracts and the cryptographic integrity of a blockchain is astronomically small compared to a paper ballot based system.