Helios Voting Reviews and details

Social recommendations and mentions

• We’re Christian Mouchet, Jean-Philippe Bossuat, Kurt Rohloff, Nigel Smart, Pascal Paillier, Rand Hindi, Wonkyung Jung, various researchers and library developers of homomorphic encryption to answer questions about homomorphic encryption and why it’s important for the future of data privacy! AMA

  This is basically how electronic voting systems like Helios work [https://vote.heliosvoting.org/]. They use additively homomorphic encryption to produce a tally for an election. Obviously a lot more stuff needs to be added to make this fully secure as an e-voting system [e.g. Zero-Knowledge proofs need to be added to the votes to ensure someone votes for a valid candidate, the decryption functionality needs to... Source: about 2 years ago

• The Paper That Keeps Showing Up

  It's a beautiful piece of theory, but when the IACR tried to build a voting scheme based on that to elect their board annually (https://vote.heliosvoting.org/), they got caught by a non-obvious bear trap when you make the whole thing non-interactive (which is the way this is mostly used in practice). Details here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/771 Basically, if you do this with a hash function, you need to HASH ALL... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago

• No sign of online voting for Toronto, despite use in other GTA regions

  There are a few good open systems used in production today, https://vote.heliosvoting.org/ is one. That said, there has been a huge amount of relevant cryptography research lately, particularly in the zero knowledge space, which unlocks more coverage of desirable security properties (less trusting of centralized providers, more privacy, more auditability, more deniability, etc). Source: about 2 years ago

• Debian decides to allow secret votes

  While not built for the purpose of voting, there have occasionally been some coin-weighted polls using the Zcash blockchain. The ability to post encrypted and immutable transactions, and selectively share viewing keys has interesting possibilities, certainly. That said, we in the Zcash community have usually used another system when holding secret-ballot votes within our community: Helios [1] [1]... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago