Re: voting
David Jablon wrote: ... *absolute* voter privacy seems like an unobtainable goal, and it should not be used to trump other important goals, like accountability. But it IS assured today by paper ballots. Nothing less should be accepted in electronic systems, otherwise new, easy and silent fraud modes become possible. Coercion and vote selling are just the most obvious. Ed Gerck
Re: voting
Yeoh Yiu wrote: Ed Gerck [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The 'second law' also takes precedence: ballots are always secret, only vote totals are known and are known only after the election ends. You get totals per nation, per state, per county, per riding, per precinct, per polling stion and maybe per ballot box. The lowest possible totals are per race, per ballot box. The 'second law' allows you to have such totals -- which are the election results for that race in that ballot box. For example, if there are two candidates (X and Y) in race A , two candidates (Z and W) in race B, and only one vote per candidate is allowed in each race, the election results for ballot box K might be: Vote totals for race A in ballot box K: Votes for candidate X: 5 Votes for candidate Y: 60 Blank votes: 50 Vote totals for race B in ballot box K: Votes for candidate Z: 45 Votes for candidate W: 50 Blank votes: 20 Total ballots in ballot box K: 115 Because only the vote totals are known for each race, a voter cannot be identified by recognizing a pre-defined, unlikely voting pattern in each race of a ballot. This exemplifies one reason why we need the 'second law' -- to preserve unlinkability between ballots and voters. So there's a need to design the system to have more voters than ballot boxes to conform to your second law. No. All you need is that there should be more than one voter per ballot box. This is a rather trivial requirement to meet. Cheers, Ed Gerck
Re: voting
David Jablon wrote: I think Ed's criticism is off-target. Where is the privacy problem with Chaum receipts when Ed and others still have the freedom to refuse theirs or throw them away? The privacy, coercion, intimidation, vote selling and election integrity problems begin with giving away a receipt that is linkable to a ballot. It is not relevant to the security problem whether a voter may destroy his receipt, so that some receipts may disappear. What is relevant is that voters may HAVE to keep their receipt or... suffer retaliation... not get paid... lose their jobs... not get a promotion... etc. Also relevant is that voters may WANT to keep their receipts, for the same reasons. It seems a legitimate priority for a voting system to be designed to assure voters that the system is working. As long as this does not go against the 'first law' for public voting systems: voters must not be linkable to ballots. The 'second law' also takes precedence: ballots are always secret, only vote totals are known and are known only after the election ends. What I see in serious voting system research efforts are attempts to build systems that provide both accountability and privacy, with minimal tradeoffs. There is no tradeoff prossible for voter privacy and ballot secrecy. Take away one of them and the voting process is no longer a valid measure. Serious voting system research efforts do not begin by denying the requirements. If some kind of tradeoff between accountability and privacy is inevitable, There is no such principle. in an extreme scenario, I'd still prefer the option to make the tradeoff for myself, rather than have the system automatically choose for me. You don't have this option when the public at large is considered, for a public election. You can do it in a private election for a club, for example, but even then only if the bylaws allow it. Cheers, Ed Gerck
Re: voting
John Kelsey wrote: At 11:05 AM 4/9/04 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: 1. The use of receipts which a voter takes from the voting place to 'verify' that their vote was correctly included in the total opens the way for voter coercion. I think the VoteHere scheme and David Chaum's scheme both claim to solve this problem. The voting machine gives you a receipt that convinces you (based on other information you get) that your vote was counted as cast, but which doesn't leak any information at all about who you voted for to anyone else. Anyone can take that receipt, and prove to themselves that your vote was counted (if it was) or was not counted (if it wasn't). The flaw in *both* cases is that it reduces the level of privacy protection currently provided by paper ballots. Currently, voter privacy is absolute in the US and does not depend even on the will of the courts. For example, there is no way for a judge to assure that a voter under oath is telling the truth about how they voted, or not. This effectively protects the secrecy of the ballot and prevents coercion and intimidation in all cases. Thus, while the assertion that Only if all the trustees collude can the election be defrauded may seem to be reasonable at first glance, it fails to protect the system in the case of a court order -- when all the trustees are ordered to disclose whatever they know and control. Also, the assertion that All of this is possible while still m aintaining voter secrecy and privacy essential to all public elections is incorrect, for the same reason. Moreover, the assertion that Vote receipts cannot be used for vote selling or to coerce your vote is also incorrect, for the same reason. These shortcomings do not depend on any specific flaw of a shuffling process, a TTP, or any other component of either system. Rather, it is a design flaw. A new election system should do no harm -- reducing the level of voter privacy and ballot secrecy should not be an acceptable trade-off for changing from paper to electronic records, or even electronic verification. Court challenges are a real scenario that election officials talk about and want to avoid. Without making voter privacy inherently safe from court orders, voter privacy and ballot secrecy are at the mercy of casuistic, political and corruption influences -- either real or potential. When the stakes are high, we need fail-safe procedures. Now, you may ask, is there any realistic possibility of a court order for all trustees to reveal their keys? Yes, especially in a hot and contested election -- and not only Bush vs. Gore. Many local elections are very close and last year an election in California was decided by *one* vote. For example, the California Secretary of State asked this as an evaluation question, when they were testing voting systems for the 2000 Shadow Election Project. The question was whether and to what extent the voting system could be broken under court order for example, if some unqualified voters were wrongly allowed to vote in a tight election and there would be a court order to seek out and disqualify their votes under best efforts. Perhaps a trustee could be chosen who would be immune even from a US court order? Well, not for a US election, which is 100% under state and/or federal jurisdiction. But there are additional scenarios -- a bug, Trojan horse, worm and/or virus that infects the systems used by all trustees would also compromise voter secrecy and, thereby, election integrity. Cheers, Ed Gerck
not really, Re: Run a remailer, go to jail?
On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 01:10:56PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.html Quoting: Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication. Frankly, I'm puzzled by the reactions to this. The text specifically talk about technologies, not humans. And, practically, the only civilian use technology it applies to is spam. It does not apply to NAT, with due respect to contrary opinions in the list, because NAT does not hide the originating or destination IP. That IP is the place of origin/destination of all packets of the translated network. It also does not apply to remailers, for the same reason -- the source/destination is that remailer. But, someone may ask, isn't a human the eventual origin/destination? Perhaps so, but the fact is that -- by definition -- *all* technologies stand in the middle and effectively conceal from a communication service provider the existence or place of origin or destination of any human involved in the communication. Humans can't send electrons in the wire, airwaves in the ether -- there is always a piece of technology in-between. Cheers, Ed Gerck
Re: QuizID?
This solution, like others based on the same principle, may not scale past ~150,000 users because of clock drift problems. Cheers -- Ed Gerck Marc Branchaud wrote: Any thoughts on this device? At first glance, it doesn't seem particularly impressive... http://www.quizid.com/ Lovely idea of two-factor authentication: The user then enters their user name (something they know) and the 8-digit Quizid passcode (something they have) into the login screen of their application. BBC NEWS | Technology | Handy future for online security http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2334491.stm Excerpt from the BBC article: Users are issued with a card and a personal code, based on a set of colour keys on the card. Each time they wish to conduct a secure transaction, they punch in the colour code and a random number is generated. M. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: TCPA / Palladium FAQ (was: Re: Ross's TCPA paper)
Interesting QA paper and list comments. Three additional comments: 1. DRM and privacy look like apple and speedboats. Privacy includes the option of not telling, which DRM does not have. 2. Palladium looks like just another vaporware from Microsoft, to preempt a market like when MS promised Windows and killed IBM's OS/2 in the process. 3. Embedding keys in mass-produced chips has great sales potential. Now we may have to upgrade processors also because the key is compromised ;-) Cheers, Ed Gerck PS: We would be much better off with OS/2, IMO. Ross Anderson wrote: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html Ross - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
