5 ms·
No, it only gives a false sense of security, which is worse. Everything you are describing relies on trust in the people that build these systems, trust in the
No, it only gives a false sense of security, which is worse. Everything you are describing relies on trust in the people that build these systems, trust in the people that invent the algorithms, trust in the people that invent the maths, trust in the chosen parameters of the cryptographic systems, and so on. Literally none of what you are describing works if you don't trust in all of these people to be (a) honest, and (b) really really good at what they're doing.
Now it's getting a bit silly. Imagine saying about all the technology infrastructure we use daily, such as electricity and computers, that since they require "trust in the people who built these systems, trust in the people who invent the algorithms, maths, and parameters of the curves etc" therefore they are giving a "false sense of security". No! The math isn't just arbitrary, the people aren't just cobbling together a computer I happen to buy. There are literally standards bodies, scientific literature, audits and much more. There are entire ecosystems for error-correction. Otherwise, throw away your technology, you're trusting phone and computer vendors, you're trusting mathematicians with math, and scientists with science... and that's actually worse than living in a world where you fetch water yourself from the river. What? No, it's not.
If you're down to those kind of arguments, I and people like me would conclude that you're out of good ones, and we have a good solution after all.
A paper ballot system isn't great at all -- it is far too slow and expensive and frustrating to run an election, and voter turnout is low for traveling and standing in line -- and certainly it is not "proven secure enough in many thousands of elections". Many elections around the world are disputed, contested, insecure, and the ones you think are secure, are also contested (e.g. the 2020 election, the 2000 election, the 2016 election). You dismiss it in cases you like (US elections) and are happy for your politicians dispute it in cases you don't like (Venezuela) etc. Even if the Supreme Court of Venezuela weighs in, you wouldn't trust it. It's a canvas on which everyone can paint their own outcome, and claim the other side "stole" the election (as if their side didn't engage in similar shenanigans to cancel it out).
If we switched to electronic systems, verification would be so cheap that anyone could do it (as it is for, say, verifying files you downloaded from the Internet with a checksum, which wasn't always the case with previous technology such as analog-to-digital MoDeMs without cryptographic security) -- not only that but it would enable so many more applications. Imagine using Git version control without a SHA1 checksum, and just "trusting the system" to never flip a bit. Imagine not being able to use Merkle Trees for downloading files, verifying their integrity, etc. These things not only improve security and reliability at almost no cost, but enable a whole class of things that would be impossible with pen and paper. Seriously you don't see a difference between, say, BitTorrenting movies and Roman scribes copying into a clay pad? Oh, but we're trusting people who discovered electricity, invented general-purpose computers and the hash algorithms, what if they're trying to trick us and will finally rugpull us all in 2025? Alan Turing and John Von Neumann will have the last laugh as we'll all download the RickRoll files instead of the ones we want.
Nothing you are describing can prove anything. It all still relies on your claim that you were trying to vote X, but the system registered you as voting Y. It's your word against the system. You can be convinced yourself, but you can't 100% convince anyone else.
Not at all. If someone was able to record a signature that their voting gateway signed vote for X as vote for X, but then later that same service claimed they voted for Y, they are caught red-handed cryptographically signing with the private key two conflicting votes. You're equating that to some villagers telling some journalist on camera that they never voted. Ugh. One can be verified by anyone, the other is just hearsay by some journalist.
There is a major difference between trusting regular infrastructure and trusting elections infrastructure. The threat model is completely different. For one, vote secrecy makes it impossible to prove that your vote was mis-registered. For another, in normal situations the cyber-adversaries I need to worry about are regular criminals, for which basic computer security practices are good enough. But votes in an election are improtant enough that nation-state actors are a real threat, and I am absolutely certain that my phone or laptop are not secure against hacking attempts by a nation, or even potentially my own government!
Not to mention, elections are the only situation where trust in my government is not fully possible: the current government has too much incentive to steal votes secretly. So, unlike the electrical grid, roads, financial infra and so on, I can't rely on implicit trust in the government to trust elections.
> If someone was able to record a signature that their voting gateway signed vote for X as vote for X, but then later that same service claimed they voted for Y, they are caught red-handed cryptographically signing with the private key two conflicting votes.
If. What if instead my voting app is showing me that my vote was correctly registered, and that key verification succeeded while the polls are still open, but once the polls close, it shows me that in reality the server registered the opposite vote? How do I prove to anyone else that I voted for X and the app was showing me I voted for X, but now the system shows I voted for Y, and that is what is recorded in the official counted results?
This doesn't even require anyone breaking the encryption: the app can just show me a lie, or some malware can intercept the display info and show a different result, etc. To not leave any trace, the malware even deletes itself from the system as soon as the election timeout expires. Or maybe I am just lying and nothing wrong happened: I voted for Y, the system recorded I voted for Y, and now I'm just trying to cast doubt. Same as a paper based election, anyone can claim anything, and it's exactly as impossible to prove one way or the other.
Plus, again, only a very very very small group of people can actually confirm for themselves that all of these complicated crypto algorithms actually do what they promise to do. Especially when looking at the end to end system. I for one am certain I couldn't verify for myself that all steps of such a system is secure. I would bet you can't either. If, say, Ron Rivest (of RSA fame) came out and said the cryptography used in the election is broken, while Adi Shamir (same) said it isn't, I would have no way to be certain which is right, and even if I tried to verify the math myself, I wouldn't trust myself as much as either of them.
You’re still misunderstanding how it works.
First of all, blockchains are a third party ledger, which is maintained by many independent nodes are the large ones are infeasible to corrupt by a nation-state. The attack could only happen at the point where you sign transactions for the smart contracts.
Voters are required to use at least 2 devices, such as scanning a QR code on their laptop (which runs Chrome) with their phone (which runs Safari).
The QR code contains (or points to) a vote that is cryptographically signed by one gateway. The website or app on the phone checks this QR code and displays the same result back to you, and you confirm it on eg your phone’s screen.
On both gateways (call them Services A and B) you indicated your preference, and digitally signed it, not just with your own key, but there is attestation by the device’s own private key, which is derived from the vendor’s key, meaning the vendor stands behind what their device or app does.
Let’s assume absolutely every signature service cannot be trusted, including all your crypto wallets, incouding Apple’s secure enclave, everything is designed to be sleeper agent to mislead you on the day of the election. They just really want to change everyone’s vote. You can still prove which services were corrupted!
Let’s say that you got signature Service A and Service B to sign two different candidates during the same chain of QR code confirmations. The proof is there that at least one of the services was corrupt. Even if it happened only once, with one voter. The indelible proof is on a blockchain and replicated so nation states can’t hide it. So no Service would agree to volunteer such a blatant proof of its own corruption, given the cost to its vendor. It would only happen if the Service would be hacked by an employee of the vendor, and that would only hurt the vendor, not the election. The vendor would try to eliminate this possibility as much as possible.
However, if service A one lied to you, and you found out after scanning the QR code with Service B, then you wouldn’t want to submit your faulty vote with service B when it revealed that to you. But the service B would already would have provable dirt on service A. Not conclusive, since the voter could after all be someone who would rather complain about a non-faulty system than vote. I won’t speculate on chances of many registered voters not wanting to vote but simply make up fake complaints about the system, but I don’t think regular users should face penalties for lying, so I’ll just accept this as a serious possibility. All I will say is, these people are similar to those who stay out and don’t vote now. It’s an issue of “turnout”.
But even in this scenario (of a malicious voter rather than malicious service), Service B would then be required to do the reverse — process your other vote, and sign the transaction, then anonymously submit it to Service A to be signed. Service A would have to either refuse to cooperate with Service B, or sign it. After that, you’d be given a QR code presented by Service B, and verify it with Service A.
Of course there could be far more than just a of Services A and B. There could be 100 services (eg web-based) and voters could be required to go through a chain of 3 of them, as determined from a random oracle (ie they don’t get to pick who to collude with). You’d get the list of 3, and an honest service would simply redirect you to the next one as you bounce between two devices via QR codes.
Service A on Laptop
Service B on Phone
Service C on Laptop - done
Everything that’s signed goes into a third-party gossipped / replicated log (doesn’t have to be a blockchain, there doesn’t have to be a total order). This log / heap is what contains the indelible proofs that can be found out anytime after the fact, which is why every service must be careful to mess up even once.
You see, there is a huge difference between actors/nodes simply voting between some arbitrary choices A and B, and nodes voting while also following cryptographic constraints amd creating a trail where cheating at any step can be caught and proven later. The latter is much harder to pull off and, given costly enough consequences, creates chilling effects and strong incentives to be honest. This is what many BFT algorithms get wrong and why they fail in the presence of over 33% malicious nodes.
https://youtu.be/BYRTvoZ3Rho?si=AGbuwZlJ85G3KXPg https://youtu.be/BYRTvoZ3Rho?si=AGbuwZlJ85G3KXPg
We're still chasing around the same issue. Say the following happens:
1. I open my laptop, and I say I want to vote for Alice. It presents a QR code.
2. I open my phone and scan the QR code. It says I'm voting for Bob.
I repeat this five times and the same happens. What do I do next? Assume I'm also afraid of publicly admitting I'm voting for Alice. Assume this only happens for a small part of the electorate, say 1-2%.
Here is another scenario: I have a sophisticated malware on both my phone and laptop.
1. I open my laptop, and say I want to vote for Alice. The malware connects to a voting server and asks it for a vote for Bob. The voting server replies with a QR code that proves I voted for Bob. The malware on my laptop then prints a QR code that says "hey, phone malware! this person thinks they voted for Alice, and here is the validation for their vote for Bob".
2. I open my phone and scan this QR code. The malware on my phone tells me "Yup, this is a vote for Alice". I press "Vote", and it sends the information from the Bob vote to the validation server. I'm happy that I voted for Alice, but the system has recorded that I voted for Bob, with all necessary signatures.
3. Even if the system includes the ability to check your vote, I can't prove to anyone else that I was trying to vote for Alice.
Now, if this happens to a huge number of people, the election may be contested and re-done (in a functioning democracy; in a dictatorship, it was the whole point). But what if it happens to a small minority, enough to only steal 1-2% of the vote? What if it's additionally well targeted to people that aren't generally trusted by their peers, so that they will be easily written off as cranks?
Also, what if I come out claiming this is what happened to me, but this didn't actually happen? What if I'm a celebrity, or a well-known scientist? What if I'm actually Alice herself, shamelessly lying to my voters that the election was stolen?
Another scenario that defeats this scheme, that I haven't even touched on before:
I am coerced, defrauded, or payed to share my private key with a third party. They vote in my name from the comfort of their own home, with every single system you described attesting that my vote was cast legally.
Try to prove that I shared my key, while still preserving the anonymity of private key <-> individual person association.
And this doesn't even get into how the private keys are given to every single person in a country without revealing them to a third party in the first place, but also without generating valid private keys for people who aren't entitled to vote.
In reality, instead of 2 distrusting parties (democrats and republicans) in each polling place, there would be 100 mutually competing / distrusting services that would like nothing better than to expose the other services as frauds with indelible cryptographic proofs. That's the basis of Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocols.
In the first scenario, to answer your question, if service 1 kept being faulty (saying you vote for Bob when you voted for Alice) then you'd simply increment your nonce and try another VoteChain that starts with service 52. The VoteChain determines which 3-4 services out of the 100 are consulted, and in what order. You have a few nonces, up to 10. If you claim ALL random services you've tried are faulty, then yeah, go ahead and sit out the vote, you're probably just a liar and complainer. They don't know who you are, so the chances of them being good for 100 other people and specifically not good for you, 10 times in a row, are very small. And even if it was true, that's 1 vote out of many. Now if this happens more frequently, then these services could be dropped from the 100, pending investigation -- which is easy since the services don't know who is voting, could be the police. So why would the services risk being on the hook for this?
In all your examples, you're begging the question.
In 1 and 2 in the second scenario, you assume that your own phone AND your own laptop AND all the servers all have malware and are undetectably malicious. In that case, you have much bigger problems -- they can, for example, steal money from many people, send messages to ruin relationships and reputations, and much more. In your example, large swaths of people can't trust any of your devices. In that case, society as a whole is cooked. It's not quite as paranoid as "not trusting the cryptographic algorithms and math", but it's close.
Let's assume that the Trusted Computing Base isn't compromised. Because if it is, then you may as well also distrust all the poll workers as being corrupt, and the media as reporting the wrong result, etc. After all, this system is being added ON TOP of the existing system, so it can only ADD security.
Regarding giving out private keys without revealing them to a third party, I have already said that's a strawman. They'd be giving out tokens that are used to prove that you have 1 vote, and they are put through a mixer by the people, like pulling numbers out of a hat. On the other hand, the public/private key pairs are generated by the person on their own devices (e.g. in the secure enclave). You can't steal these keys so easily, unless you steal the person's phone AND coerce them to enter biometrics when voting. But then you could just make them do a wire transfer or anything else.
Look, about this constant refrain about "coersion, defrauding, etc" this happens already. Voter intimidation can happen already, preventing you from going to a polling place, or simply disenfranchising you making it too inconvenient or far to go. It's a much BIGGER problem now, that would be REDUCED if you could vote from your phone, and on net you'd have an improvement.
Also, since in the USA you don't need to present ID while voting, a person could tie you up in your basement and go vote as you. Since in your hypopthetical world, illegal coersion and force and defrauding has no consequences apparently, then that would mean in CURRENT voting schemes, people could just vote as others.
Heck, in Australia, I could even get someone in trouble by voting AS THEM. Their name would appear twice. In Australia, they fine you if you didn't show up to vote. So without IDs, you can get in trouble either way (if you don't show up, or if you supposedly voted twice).
I'm telling you, the same people who claim IDs are totally unnecessary for voting, are the same people trying to find attacks on cryptographically secure voting. But many of these "rubber hose attacks" are already doubly possible in today's "physical" voting schemes, along with all the other downsides (the cost, the speed, the scandals, as you can see with uncertainty in elections around the world).
30% of the USA thinks that the 2020 election results were illegitimate. You can't wave that away as "well, our paper elections are great, they're just partisan hacks/deluded". I bet you with cryptographic elections, that 30% would be far less, and elections / referendums would also be cheaper and easier to do all the time. You wouldn't need to do it once every 4 years and spend billions AND it would be more reliable.
https://www.umass.edu/political-science/ https://www.umass.edu/political-science/