CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar

Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Tal Moran

Title: Receipt-Free Universally-Verifiable Voting With Everlasting Privacy

Abstract:
Using cryptographic techniques, it is possible to design a fair voting system whose correct operation can be verified by anyone, while still retaining ballot secrecy. Such voting schemes are called “Universally Verifiable”. If, in addition, the voting scheme prevents vote buying and coercion, we say it is “receipt-free”.

Our scheme is the first receipt-free scheme to give “everlasting privacy” for votes: even a computationally unbounded party does not gain any information about individual votes (other than what can be inferred from the final tally). Following in the footsteps of Chaum and Neff, our protocol ensures that the integrity of an election cannot be compromised even if the computers running it are all corrupt!

The talk won’t assume any previous knowledge of cryptography or computer science — I’ll try to explain the protocols and the intuitions behind them using simple physical metaphors.

This is joint work with Moni Naor