secret ballot / Blog: Recent posts

About the current state of the development.
The initial impulse was to illustrate the potential of the use of cryptographic tools and to advertise the electronic version of the democratic procedure itself. So at start the platform was designed as a feature rich establishment in a hope to draw some professional interest and support. Unfortunately it did not, and for sometime it remained to be such, the Demonstration only thing.
But after some efforts put into development the project had grown well behind the desktop presentation in some aspects, on the other hand it lacks several obvious features expected from a public service of this sort. Like the lack of browser http support for the server or Linux-only realisation of the client to name the few.

In a short I hope get through the debugging stage for the server and get a working, reasonably reliable instance of it on the current set of tasks. But the next advance into development would require a significant amount of effort as to get a platform independent client program on the first place, develop a framework for irregular ballot formats, extend the encryption part of the protocol to eliminate "last layer modification attack" (i will write about one day). This is not quite the stuff I want to invest heavily into.

On the good side of things the Secret Ballot project was an absolute zero-knowledge starter for me, I have learned a lot, had fun, but some pieces of code could still remain naive and wrong before get fixed one day. ... read more

The goal of the project is to demonstrate the fit of the PK cryptography to the needs of electronic democracy main procedure - secret protected voting. The main challenges is to have an affordable scalable solution with the regulated access for a restricted, dynamically grown group of users. It is not a public open service but rather an Electronic Party Instrument.

Also the thing is not 100% technical, but should come forward along with some social regulations governing the access to the services, which is one of the key points in the Election issues. So one part of the system is to provide the means for public control over user pool grow. The other is to enhance the trust to outcome results with a set of cryptography protected routines.... read more