NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/sci/crypt/2921

Text File | 1992-08-17 | 1.9 KB | 41 lines

Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!daisy.learning.cs.cmu.edu!Marc.Ringuette
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Cryptographic voting
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 20:50:00 GMT
Lines: 30

[e-mail] (Ken Pizzini) writes (in personal mail),
> Sorry I don't have time right now to do the comparison myself, but
> check out "A Cryptographic Scheme for Computereized General Elections"
> by Kenneth Iverson in the Crypto '91 Proceedings (page 405).

Thanks for the pointer, Ken.  His scheme looks good.  Here's a sketch:

  The election takes place between voters and k candidates, at least
  one of whom is assumed honest.  Each voter communicates with all of
  the candidates in order to register and vote.  The voter obtains
  an "eligibility token", prior to election day, signed by all the
  candidates.  On election day, the voter submits a vote to each
  candidate using a zero-knowledge protocol so that they can verify
  the validity of the vote but not its contents.  To tally results,
  the candidates must sign and publish their sub-tallies, and (I think)
  only then can the results be computed.  Correctness and privacy is
  assured as long as one of the candidates is honest.

This method of cryptographically masking the votes until an aggregate
is computed seems like a good idea, and probably is superior to my
anonymity-based method.  I don't quite understand how it works, though.

One concern I have with Iverson's method is that the protocol stalls
whenever any of the candidates is unresponsive.  Of course, "candidate"
may be a misnomer -- perhaps the parties involved should be mutually
independent watchdog agencies.


M.