Quantum Crypto in the Real World

bednarz writes "Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland during parliamentary elections to be held Oct. 21, marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for election protection purposes. "We would like to provide optimal security conditions for the work of counting the ballots," said Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor. "In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage.""

Comments

Yeah!

[UbuntuDupe]

Or at least, in a superposition of having been tampered with and not having been tampered with.

Re:Yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Print article.

Article says Oct 21 the electronic votes will be mixed with the mail votes, then counted..I'm sure that will reduce the likelihood that any given vote was tampered with..[/sarcasm]

Re:Yeah!

[Ulven]

You may have linked to the article, but did you read it?

"Once the election is closed - at noon on Sunday, Oct. 21 - the sealed ballot boxes of all the polling stations are brought to the central counting station, where they are opened and where the votes are mixed with the mail votes. Counting them is then manually done at the central counting station. People counting the votes at this central station use computers to transfer the counts to the data center of the canton of Geneva," Ribordy explained.

The quantum-cryptography system is used once the votes have been counted, to transfer those counts to the data center.

No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!

[Cyberax]

Nuff said :)

Heisenburg Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Each voter is voting for all candidates simultaneously until the vote is actually read.

Re:Heisenburg Voting

[ultranova]

Each voter is voting for all candidates simultaneously until the vote is actually read.

Well, it's still a step ahead of Diablo voting machines.

The Heisen-Rove uncertainty principle

[User 956]

Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland

Bah, we hace somnething similar in the U.S. Diebold has been using quantum encryption technology on their voting systems for years. That is to say, attempting to examine the vote count, alters the count.

Immeasurable!

[kcbanner]

Election results rendered immeasurable for fear of changing the result!

I was born in Switzerland.

[frup]

While I do not live there anymore as far as I know barely anybody votes! I guess that means that if even a small sample of votes get tampered, it can have a big effect.

Re:I was born in Switzerland.

[darthflo]

Yep, it's rather bad - about 30-50% of all voters actually vote, but the upcoming elections might have a bit higher participation (some very aggressive campaigning been going on for the past weeks). I think this is directly related to Switzerland being a very direct democracy - with enouh support (that's in numbers of people, not money), almost every decision of the Swiss political leaders can be overturned by the Swiss people.

That Doesn't Make Sense

[logicnazi]

If the only concern is non-intentional errors introduced by hardware (or software) then a simple hash should be effective.

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[phantomcircuit]

A hash of a single bit variable? Genius

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[Jarjarthejedi]

Okay, we'll ROT2 it first...will that make you happy?

(Actually it would probably be better represented as a full string of the candidate's name. Sure, it's more memory, but it'd be an especially remarkable series of faults that manages to flip every bit in that string to another candidate's name (assuming it's not purposefully tampered with) while just about any error would mess up a single, or double (got to assume there's not just 2 candidates, even if there are usually only 2 candidates) bit encoding.)

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Also not making sense are the reference to the "1 GHz quantum encrypter" and the statement that they're holding back information about how it works for security reasons. Either it's vulnerable or it isn't. And gigahertz are the wrong units of measure. And quantum key exchange doesn't work that fast.

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[Jarjarthejedi]

But the biggest question of all...how many Parsecs does it take for this system to make the Kessel Run?

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[phantomcircuit]

Why bother hashing? why not just assign an arbitrary string of acceptable length to each candidate.

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[ceroklis]

It does make sense if you realize that the only point of the exercise is economic promotion of the Geneva region. Robert Hensler is also pushing internet voting (using local technology) for the same reasons. See for instance this. The mention "ideal business location" should give you an idea of what this is all about.

Re:That Doesn't Make Sense

[darthflo]

It's not as simple as "A or B". IIRC, two houses for a total of some 250 people have to be populated out of a few hundred candidates distributed into some "lists" and being able to be voted for individually, a single integer probably won't be a viable option to store a vote (an array of integers might, but I assume it's going to be strings).

I love this misguided attempt at security

[spagetti_code]

Its kinda like when someone says they are using 4096 bit encryption for their SSL banking, and not realising their password is being stolen by a keylogger.

The biggest problem we face today is *not* the encryption. We have bags of good encryption technologies out there, from AES (symmetric) to a variety of Public Key techniques. The problem actually comes from the people and processes at either end of the encryption pipe.

Guess what - no-ones SSID has (probably) ever been stolen while in transit via SSL over the internet. The millions of SSIDs stolen to date have been theft of laptops or admins not securing their websites properly. Hopefully they will understand this, and spend an equal portion of their time/energy securing their endpoints.

Re:I love this misguided attempt at security

[TheSpengo]

Agreed. It's not like anyone can crack your generic public key encryption yet anyways. You'd have to have one hell of a computer to do it in any reasonable amount of time. They probably just thought the word "quantum" sounded cool. It has that "omg l33t h4x0r" or "oo shiny star trek technology" ring to it. ;)

Re:I love this misguided attempt at security

[SnoopJeDi]

You'd have to have one hell of a computer to do it in any reasonable amount of time.

...or use these new Quantum Computer things. You know, the ones that can run algorithms that can crack conventional cryptography.

If they weren't using this, people would be complaining that politicians aren't utilizing technology enough.

Re:I love this misguided attempt at security

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum computers are only really good at cracking asymmetric encryption algorithms. Specifically the ones that depend on factoring large numbers being difficult. Stuff like AES is slightly easier with quantum computers, but easy enough to be practically defeated.

Asymmetric algorithms are still important for key exchange and some other stuff, so their being cracked is still a big deal.

Re:I love this misguided attempt at security

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how missing one word completely changes the meaning... Should be:

Stuff like AES is slightly easier with quantum computers, but not easy enough to be practically defeated.

Re:I love this misguided attempt at security

[AllAboutVoting]

I agree. I see little of value here. Part of that may be due to the lack of details in the article and the useless trust destroying statement "the Swiss government is not sharing a lot of information on certain details for security reasons."

Counts are encrypted as they are passed from one place to another. Note that that those counts should be public information anyways, so the intent of the quantum crypto is to preserve the message - not to keep it secret.

Those counts could have been adequately protected using many other commonly used crypto techniques like SSL.

Such a tiny part of the chain from casting the ballot to reporting the election results is protected that this is just not very interesting.

They never get it

[goombah99]

Crypto and now Quantum Crypto--theve voting machine folks just never get. Too wrapped in the forest of their own cleverness to see the trees. All these assertions of provable voting miss the entire point of transparency. Voters need to be able to see how it all works. You don't wrap it up in a trust-me-the-math-proves-it burrito and call it transparent. All that does is exclude participation in the process and every time you centralize the cryto it means it takes fewer and fewer people to exploit the hole they forgot to close and don't know about yet. The real solution is to spread the problem out in the sunshine so that even if it allows more people access to fudging things it also takes more people to achieve a significant fudge and the risk of getting caught is higher.

The key thing about voting is this: it's actually unlikely anyone will cheat but every wants to be sure it did not happen. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost not proving who won. it has to be convincing.

Re:They never get it

[causality]

While I can't say I know very much about how this is being implemented, and therefore could only speculate about the threat model and how it is being addressed, I very much appreciate your point about the need for transparency. I would further submit that an aspect of the problem that is not often discussed but certainly does have a strong influence in the outcome of elections and how they affect the country (i.e. the entire point of having a vote) is not so much how the voting is carried out, but who is doing the voting.

I realize how unrealistic it is that this would actually be tried, but what I would really like to see is a restriction that prevents anyone from voting until they demonstrate that they understand how the government actually works. Something like a (hopefully very tough) civics test that must be passed every so often in order to retain the right to vote, with emphasis on what is and what is not the proper role of government. At least in the USA, it seems that just because so-called "literacy tests" were abused for the purpose of denying suffrage to black people, during a time when the evils of open racism were widespread, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to discard the entire idea that a voter should demonstrate some competence before performing such an important duty.

This could work if anyone who meets the other requirements (at least 18 years of age, not a convicted felon, etc.) is eligible to take such a test and maybe it would be a good idea to allow them to re-take the test until they pass. The idea is that with informed voters who understand how the system was intended (by the Founding Fathers) to work, elections would be determined more by a candidate's position on issues, their track record (if available) of how they handled previous positions of power, and whether their ideas are actually sustainable long-term (which many of our entitlement programs are not, such as Social Security and other vote-buying techniques) and less by 30-second ads on TV, campaign slogans, empty promises, and party affiliation. I believe this would also have the effect of selecting against the knee-jerk, ill-considered reaction of valuing security more than freedom and would probably also make it a little easier for candidates who do not belong to the two major parties to win elections beyond the local-government level.

One thing that has always bothered me about politics is the unwillingness to try new ideas to see if they are superior (and if not, why) and abandon them if they are not. It seems that we have too much faith in the status quo and are only ever willing to change it in reaction to some kind of crisis -- often due to skillful use of Problem, Reaction, Solution aka Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Hegel) -- by taking measures that wind up being set in stone and very difficult to change in the future.

Re:They never get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an FYI...

Technically, in the USA, the Peoples vote doesn't even matter.

In the end, its all up to the representatives of your state (for whom you voted for(the votes that _do_ have meaning)).

Re:They never get it

[Planesdragon]

Technically, in the USA, the Peoples vote doesn't even matter.

1: only when voting for President. All other elections are direct-election.

2: Even then, it's a choice of one of two slates of electors, who go and are usually required by law to vote a certain way.

Re:They never get it

[Anonymous Coward]

While I very much agree with the idea of selective voting rights the implementation of such a scheme is likely to be immensely difficult to get right and open to abuse. Excluding anyone from the voting process (no matter how stupid or ill informed) is potentially very dangerous. One of the main ideas behind democracy is to ensure that the resulting governance is representative of the people being governed (yes, yes, I know it dosnt always work this way but...). The problem lies in setting what cutoff in intelligence/comprehension is acceptable and more importantly WHO is allowed to set it.

Even at its most innocuous, you are likely to have section of society who lack the ability to pass this 'test' (and probably on a regular basis) for no other reason than that they are not very academic. To them the bar will always be too high to allow them any control over how they are governed - they might as well be living in a dictatorship.

At its worst, imagine how this scheme could be abused in the run up to an election if those who are allowed to design the tests are not open and impartial. Imagine how you would feel if you were excluded from voting because you failed a test that asked you questions you never had a chance of answering correctly.

Re:They never get it

[Fred_A]

Crypto and now Quantum Crypto--theve voting machine folks just never get. Too wrapped in the forest of their own cleverness to see the trees. All these assertions of provable voting miss the entire point of transparency. Voters need to be able to see how it all works. Ah but you can't look at it. That's the point of quantum crypto.

But how does it work ?
It's quantum.
Can I look ?
Not it would break it.

Re:They never get it

[gnud]

So if your opinion of what a goverment should be deviates from the norm, then you can't vote?

A system such as you describe will only strengthen the notion that there is one "correct" form of goverment.

Re:They never get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Great idea! We can call them "Jim Crowe Laws"!

Re:They never get it

[causality]

The idea of a civics test is not a particular outcome as you seem to suggest (nice straw man btw), but the more basic concepts of how the system is implemented. It would require that the voter knows i.e. what the executive branch does that the legislative does not, the intentions behind the Bill of Rights and what they were designed to protect (and what they were designed to protect from), and that government only really does three things well, which are: defense, law enforcement, and public works. Someone who could pass such a test would probably also know that the Founding Fathers intended for the vast majority (90+%) of government to come from the local and state level during peacetime. Someone who understand very well how the system is implemented would also tend to recognize when it is being abused, either by vote-buying programs or by noticing how asset forfeiture laws directly contradict the 4th Amendment or by observing that the Fairness Doctrine contradicts the First Amendment. Widespread ignorance is the main reason why these things have gone on without much of a challenge, and a requirement that you need to such pass a test before you may vote would help ensure that those who choose to remain ignorant (which is fine, it is their choice) will not collectively have power over everyone else (which is not fine).

It's not so much the idea of a "correct" form of government as much as it would be a requirement that we actually learn from history and understand why some ideas have proven to be better than others. Also why some practices, such as allowing the government to take care of items beyond its purview like the various entitlement programs (sorry but if you're 20 years old and can't figure out that one day you will grow old and will want to retire, and that the time to start saving for that is right now, then perhaps you should serve as an example to others ala the ant and the grasshopper and not consider this the federal government's problem as though you were some baby who needs to be taken care of) tend to lead to the tyranny of a police state. That is the main way that rulers weaken their people and make them dependent; they do so by taking care of things for you that you really should be taking care of yourself yet they never do as good of a job as you could have done; compare the average Social Security payout with someone who has saved money in a Roth IRA for example.

While I won't say that there is One Correct Way to do things (that would be silly in this case), there is certainly a correct approach to the problem of how to govern. That correct form would stay the fuck out of my life whenever possible, would recogize that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they damned well please as long as they do not harm someone against their will (doing drugs in your own home and bothering no one, OK - doing drugs and driving a car and endangering others, NOT OK - see the difference?), and would not use deficit spending and unsustainable income transfer programs and class warfare (progressive income taxes) to buy votes and encourage a "what can I get out of this" mentality. Income taxes are designed to manipulate behavior; that is the only "feature" they offer that a national sales tax does not (and indeed a national sales tax would generate MORE revenue since it would be more difficult to cheat and now foreigners visiting here would also pay taxes) so I don't consider them to be a "correct" form either. Care to tell me what's wrong with these ideas or will you continue to pontificate from a veiled "who is he to say that" stance? Because what you will eventually notice is that there is such a thing as truth (if you say there isn't I will merely ask you "is that true?") and that learning from past mistakes is a good way to get closer to it. Business does this all the time, refining production and marketing ideas etc.; the problem with government is that it doesn't have any competition so the incentive to improve must come from us.

Re:They never get it

[moogle001]

I sincerely hope you realize that your post proves why there can't be any civics test. Your assumptions on what government can and can't do well and what's good for the common man are just that: assumptions. Many, many people in the world would disagree with you. But hey, you may be right, you may be wrong. It's all political theory, after all. Which is why we shouldn't be requiring people to agree.

Re:They never get it

[yariv]

You assume that the Founding Fathers intended for 90% of the government to come from local/state level, it might even be correct. However, the question is not what were their intentions but what is written in the constitution. By the way, they also intended for black people to be slaves and for women to have no vote, do you think anyone who think differently should not be entitled to vote? You might not say there is only one correct way to do things, but you definitly say there is a very small number of ways, and they can't be very different from yours. As for income tax, it allows you a higher level of taxation over those who can handle it (that is, relatively rich people). This allows Capitalism to work, without an income tax, the ever-growing income differences will make one of the two systems collapse - the Democracy or the Capitalism. You could get the same effect from sales tax, but only if you make it progressive by different levels of taxation on different products, so basic products will be (at least, almost) tax free, and luxuries will be taxed heavily. It is more complex, as you'll have to devise a mechanism for defining the taxation level for every product, and the complexity will make it exploitable, just as with the income tax.

Re:They never get it

[causality]

You assume that the Founding Fathers intended for 90% of the government to come from local/state level, it might even be correct. However, the question is not what were their intentions but what is written in the constitution. By the way, they also intended for black people to be slaves and for women to have no vote, do you think anyone who think differently should not be entitled to vote? You might not say there is only one correct way to do things, but you definitly say there is a very small number of ways, and they can't be very different from yours.

I know of no writings left by the Founding Fathers where they stated that they believed slavery was right; I personally tend to believe that they realized they could not win that battle (look how long it took for the abolition movement to succeed) and focused pragmatically on what was within their power to achieve but I have not seen much evidence on this either way. Also, when it is studied objectively, it has been found that allowing women to vote may not be the best idea, because they tend to value security more than freedom and the type of security that government has to offer is a very dangerous thing. Please see the studies; there are very strong correlations between granting women suffrage and the expansion of the size and power of government. Some links: A brief summary that mentions this same belief, shared by a woman, a paper by John Lott on the subject (I believe this one is originally from here) and a general, light read on why big government is a bad idea here. You will find, however, that this is a subject where the facts tend not to reflect what people want to hear, and (because people often act like spoiled children when this is the case) it's hard to have a discussion about it in which people actually stick to facts and logic.

Regarding the "very small number of ways", I didn't just make this up in a vacuum, you know. Study a little history and you will find it plainly evident that every nation which has ever become a police state or a fascist dictatorship did so by allowing its government to become too large and too powerful and too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens and by considered myriad things other than defense, public works, and law enforcement to be its business. The idea is so simple. When an organ in the body carries out its function and serves the rest of the body (when the heart's only concern is pumping blood, when the lungs' only concern is respiration, etc.), that body is healthy; when an organ draws a disproportionate share of resources and multiplies its cells beyond what is necessary for its function, it grows out of control, concerns itself only with its own perpetuation, and becomes a cancer that threatens to kill the rest of the body. Likewise, government does the same and becomes a parasite feeding on its own people when it becomes the all-important solution to every problem and starts making decisions for its people when there is no legitimate public interest in doing so (although plenty of busybodies will invent such reasons to satisfy their need to control others), such as when it attempts to tell consenting adults what they may and may not do in their own homes.

As for income tax, it allows you a higher level of taxation over those who can handle it (that is, relatively rich people). This allows Capitalism to work, without an income tax, the ever-growing income differences will make one of the two systems collapse - the Democracy or the Capitalism. You could get the same effect from sales tax, but only if you make it progressive by different levels of taxation on different products, so basic products will be (at least, almost) tax free, and luxuries will be taxed heavily.

Re:They never get it

[yariv]

I will not argue over what the Founding Fathers intended, but slavery was accepted by them, it was not forbidden by the constitution, and some of them held slaves (Washington, for example). Anyway, I am not american, so I don't really care what were their intentions. As for women's voting, the point is not whether women are less likely to vote by the standards you propse, but should they have a vote. In the system you propse, should they be tested. The Founding Fathers were (at least most of them) male-chauvinist and racist. I don't blame them, they lived in the 18th century, but we must remember that they lived in the 18th century. They build a mechanism that fitted the world as they knew it, not the modern world. Modern things you might need from the government you will find research (that today cost so much that only the government can allow itself basic research), and some way to support the economy (like subsidies for education. This method works well in northern europe). Public works might do as well, if you'll invent new ones all the time (that worked in the great depression, held you fine until you had all the public works you could care for in the war), but that's not what you meant, right?.

Study a little history and you will find it plainly evident that every nation which has ever become a police state or a fascist dictatorship did so by allowing its government to become too large and too powerful and too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens and by considered myriad things other than defense, public works, and law enforcement to be its business. This is nonsense, you are replacing the reason and the outcome. Any totalitaric regime is too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens, but it usually what it does after seizing power. Take the Nazis as an example, or the USSR. In the first, you had a democratic government that became a totalitaristic one by first giving all the power to one man, than removing every opposition. Most totalitaristic aspect were relatively late. By the way, the first thing they did was a lot of public works (roads, etc.), from 1933 and on (they used the opposition for this as well, obviously). With the USSR, they rose from the ruins of a weak government (the democratic government from february 1917) and they became totalitaristic only in the early 1920, after the end of the civil war, when their force was based over the Red Army (by the way, a socialistic country could be free, see Ukrain at the same time (with Makhno) for example, or read Kropotkin).

You seem to misunderstand the meaning of a "progressive" tax. The point is not only that rich people pay more, but that they pay higher percentage of their income\spending. This is the reason you will need different levels of taxation for different products. If you earn 50,000$ a month, you can easily pay 50% of it to the government. If you earn 5,000$ a month, it will not be so simple.

You can do it by returning money to people based on how much money you think they need, but this will not simplify things. Those rates will have to change continuosly with time, and will depend not only on the number of members in the household but on their ages, where they live, maybe even their religion. Is a "kosher" food a luxury? There are places kosher food might cost 400% more then non-kosher.

The last thing I would like to indicate, is that even if you're not "filthy rich" I would guess you are not poor as well. You can afford most things you need, including proper health care and education, which is usually pretty expensive. So am I, by the way. The point is, that money is, as you indicated, pretty useless if you have enough. If you don't have enough, it is one of the most important things in the world. For a joyous life you need first to satisfy your basic needs (food, shelter, etc.), then something for you security (social security as well), and only then you will move to higher things that will give "real meaning" to your life. Maslow described it pretty well.

Re:They never get it

[causality]

They build a mechanism that fitted the world as they knew it, not the modern world.

Some things are timeless, such as the observation that, given enough time, all governments decay into police states or dictatorships unless proactive steps are taken, primarily by those who can see the obvious, to prevent this. This is simply entropy on a large scale. The USA has already exceeded the life expectancy of a constitutional republic by nearly fifty years.

Modern things you might need from the government you will find research (that today cost so much that only the government can allow itself basic research), and some way to support the economy (like subsidies for education. This method works well in northern europe).

The government really has no legitimate reason to be in the education business, and if you actually research how "public" (government) schools got started you will find that the intentions of those who founded them in the USA and elsewhere were not nearly so noble as the common belief that it was done to benefit the public. The founders of it were surprisingly open about the fact that it was for the purpose of social control, not education. For example, Andrew Bell was fascinated by the schools in India, which had the sole purpose of instilling a docile, unquestioning servitude in the vast majority of the population (all except those from the Brahma, warrior, and industrial/trade caste) in order to maintain the caste system that could otherwise be overthrown by a revolution, since the menial and the "untouchable" castes were 95% of the population! A Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, was instrumental in bringing a system like this first to London and then to the USA; and while he had better intentions, he mistakenly believed that such a system could be used to achieve a different effect. ** Prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a speech during which he said:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Around 1917, a group known as the "Education Trust" took control of the administration of the schools in the USA. This group consisted of people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. ** According to Benjamin Kidd, the chief goal of this group was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." When you consider who these people are, you can see why they would want that, but it would be absurd to claim that this is for the public good, or that it's acceptable for government to use state police power to mandate compulsory education in order to meet this goal.

** Both of those quotes are almost directly from the book The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, and the full text can be read here. This is a complete book so you won't be reading the whole thing in ten minutes, but I would strongly encourage everyone to read it, since it's one of the best I have read on the subject.

This is nonsense, you are replacing the reason and the outcome. Any totalitaric regime is too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens, but it usually what it does after seizing power.

That's just it. The USA government is already too large and is already too powerful and is already too involved in the lives of its citizens. The people behind this are very smart and realize that seizing power all at once would probably create a backlash, so they are currently still busy establishing a national enemy -- Germany blamed its problems on the Jews, and we blame our problems on drugs, guns, and now terrorists (nevermind that you are more likely to be injured by a lightning strike than by a ter

Using multiple signatures at the same time

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose if you're using multiple algorithms like MD5, SHA1 and Tiger to figerprint a dataset. Would that increase exponentially the dificulty of breaking the encryption and corrupting the data by finding the intersection of all those algorithms?

Schrodinger's President

[BradleyUffner]

How did the scientists get around the fact that they don't know who won until after the person takes office?

Re:Schrodinger's President

[Jarjarthejedi]

They put him in a box with a large radiation emitter. The same thing's being considered over here I hear :P.

What's that? We were only supposed to leave him in there a short time? Oh...new election!

Re:Schrodinger's President

[Anonymous Coward]

they don't check

Quantum Voting by Stalin

[Gothmolly]

"He who casts the votes decides nothing, he who counts the votes decides everything.... or not."

Re:Quantum Voting by Stalin

[Plutonite]

Gets a bit more complicated when it's a "they" who count the vote not a single "he". And unless you live in a totalitarian society like, say, the one Stalin had oppressed/dream-talked into submission to his every command, there should not be an easy way to convince all the people who should be involved in the voting procedure to do something illegal. That is why people on slashdot want less machinery/electronics and more people/paper involved - it is hard to pull off a conspiracy with thousands of people.

And in the western world we like to think that election fraud is an exception, not the norm. Perhaps Stalin was thinking of Soviet Russia, where quantum -encrypted voting results observe YOU!

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice of you to leave your signature there - good for making sure your posts get modded down in the future.

I vote for Shroedingger!

[Tablizer]

If you don't like the election results, then just never observe the candidate, meaning they don't actually exist.

Re:I vote for Shroedingger!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the election results, then just never observe the candidate, meaning they don't actually exist.

Seems W pulled this during Katrina

Re:I vote for Shroedingger!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vote for Schrödinger!
A cat in every box!

In other words...

[NotQuiteReal]

The problem actually comes from the people

We let too many stupid people vote? Is that what you are saying?

Re:In other words...

[Spy der Mann]

We let too many stupid people vote? Is that what you are saying?

Unfortunately, it's true. Remember how many votes Bush got in 2004? :'(

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

um, fewer votes than Gore?

'nuff said.

Re:In other words...

[Adambomb]

as far as the original reasons, The need for an electoral college wavered with the telegraph amd died with the airplane.

And I never did understand the concept of "unfair popular votes between states". Yes, you're all distinct by state, but isn't the president the president of the country? Wouldn't the senators, governors, and house representatives still be distinct to their regions?

Could someone put this into perspective that makes any sense to the outsider?

Re:In other words...

[logicnazi]

No, the electoral college has important value besides merely respecting states rights. Hell, once we abandoned real electors and sworn electors were selected by popular vote arguably the electoral college does more to hurt state local interests than help since there is no need to fuss with states that are clearly in one column or the other.

The real benefit of the electoral college is to blunt the tendency of incomplete turn out to encourage extreme views. Notice that there are two ways to win elections: A) increase the percentage of people voting who choose you B) increase the percentage or people who want you who actually vote. We saw B used to great effect by Rove in recent elections but it's impact is somewhat blunted by the electoral college.

With the electoral college it doesn't matter how many extra votes you get out in a strong red/blue state it still counts the same. What matters is whether you can carry the moderate states. Thus there is less incentive to take extreme positions motivating turn out in the states that strongly support you and more to take the sorts of positions that will win in the moderate states. Sure there are still partisans of both stripes in every state but a republican in ohio isn't the same thing as a republican in Wyoming.

In my opinion the original founders were right and we should go back to a REAL electoral college.

Re:In other words...

[Fred_A]

With the electoral college it doesn't matter how many extra votes you get out in a strong red/blue state it still counts the same. What matters is whether you can carry the moderate states. Thus there is less incentive to take extreme positions motivating turn out in the states that strongly support you and more to take the sorts of positions that will win in the moderate states. Sure there are still partisans of both stripes in every state but a republican in ohio isn't the same thing as a republican in Wyoming. Your logic seems to imply that if there wasn't an electoral college in place, all the people in a given state would still vote the same way.
Presumably that wouldn't be the case. Most states would be moderate with a wide ventilation of votes across the spectrum.
(disclaimer, not from the US. And I never really got that electoral state thing either.)

Re:No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring i

[Alwin Henseler]

So don't: just follow the news, get feedback from your slaves, count the # of eggs thrown at your limousine and the # of stones and RPG's thrown at your armored vehicle. Lock up some opposition leaders, and torture them long enough to get some real answers about your position in the political arena. Finally, have some of your drones calculate the statistical probability of you winning the election, and (when it's up in the high 90's) HAVE an election. Next, proclaim your statistical calculated guesstimate as the official outcome of the election. But (for fair results) whatever you do, DON'T LOOK AT THE ACTUAL VOTES!

These dictator types are way ahead of us old-fashioned democracies!

amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

we cant even get a paper trail, and they get quantum encryption.

Oblig.

[Romicron]

In Soviet Russia, votes observe YOU!

Repeat after me...

[fluffy99]

Quantum cryptography is not encryption. A method of secure key exchange perhaps, but it's not encryption.

Re:Repeat after me...

[blueg3]

Actually, it's a very fast method of detecting an intercepted communication. As such, it's usually grouped with encryption mechanisms. There's absolutely no way of intercepting the data that's not very rapidly detectable, so you can limit the loss of information before terminating the communication. If the information you're transmitting is such that a handful of bits is useless, it's an excellent security system.

This is not, however, the first time it's been used.

Yes and everyone knows Dell has them in stock...

[TheSpengo]

...because if they did, I would have bought one already!

Cerberis?

[ZMerLynn]

According to id Quantique's CEO Gregoire Ribordy, the firm's Cerberis product ... Cerberis? That name sounds awfully familiar.

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately you are wrong, and perhaps should be referred to: http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/022703.htm

"...in professional contexts, it is probably best to avoid ending sentences with prepositions simply because many people *think* that doing so is always incorrect. Many readers do not recognize the difference between ending a sentence with a preposition whose object appears earlier in the sentence and ending a sentence with a preposition that has no object."

The object of the tampering is the data in transit. No problem there.

I wonder if

[Vadim Makarov]

it is exactly the same quantum cryptosystem that has recently been broken (by an attack exploiting a component imperfection)?

In fact, I would love to see a statement from id Quantique that this security issue discovered in their equipment has been addressed. There hasn't been such a statement, to my knowledge.

Re:I wonder if

[blueg3]

That wouldn't make sense. This applies to a specific system and not to the general concept. The point of the paper isn't that there's a particular outstanding security problem (there is, but it only applies to the one device studied), but that just because quantum cryptography is theoretically perfect doesn't mean that device implementations are necessarily perfect.

Re:I wonder if

[Vadim Makarov]

You are correct. However the paper has studied exactly the same device implementation that is currently being used to secure the Swiss elections. It doesn't say so in the abstract, but in the body of the paper the lab version of the id Quantique cryptosystem is listed. It is likely their full-link version uses exactly the same quantum hardware as in the lab version, plus the classical VPN equipment.

Re:I wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

Two points about the "breaking" of idQuantique's system:

1. The system that was broken was slightly modified to make the attack feasible with current technology (the laser was replaced). The attack would still be possible with the unmodified version, but would require better eavesdropping technology.

2. It was only broken in the "information theoretic" sense. That is, the number of "really secret" bits is slightly less than the actual length of the output "secret key". It is still not possible to read any single bit of the key that is supposed to be secret. The Cerberis system uses AES with rapid key switching instead of one-time-pad, and therefore loses the "information theoretic/unconditional" security on that level anyway, so some leakage on the quantum level shouldn't matter.

Anyway, this is a showcase of local technology more than anything. The guy from the city says they mainly want to be sure that the data is not tampered with. What he probably doesn't know (but idQuantique knows very well) is that any quantum cryptography system needs to use classical information theoretic secure hashing to verify the data. If secrecy is not a concern (the data will be published anyway), those techniques can very well be used to verify the messages without any quantum system being involved.

"Quantum" whatever.

[RightSaidFred99]

It's a bunch of god damn gobbledy gook. They think if they call it "quantum" something it sounds high tech and futuristic. This technology isn't quantum anything, any more than any process that uses light or electricity is "quantum" something.

It's a bunch of shit, and it will never come to anything. Repeat after me: Quantum (x) is, for any value of x, just nerd porn and will never provide super-fast or super-secure _anything_ in the real workd.

Re:"Quantum" whatever.

[SEMW]

This technology isn't quantum anything, any more than any process that uses light or electricity is "quantum" something. Whilst that is indeed often the case (see also: audophiles; new age health), in this particular instance you're wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography.

Re:By reading this comment

[nilbud]

"You're".

oh no

[mrjb]

That will take at least half an hour to break! *sigh* How I wish I had never seen that movie.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Swordfish, sawfish..is your memory encrypted with a one-thousand twenty-four bit cypher, such that even you can't get through the firewall?

Quantum cryptography and internet voting

[Zorglub1234]

This is mainly an advertising stunt. The State of Geneva has been promoting an evoting (internet) system for the past 6 years. They complain that citizens are not interested in the voting process, but every time computer scientists (mainly free software advocates) have indicated that they had doubts about the system (but noone except the State has access to the system), the criticisms were treated with disdain (to say the least !). Some background information about the system is at http://www.geneve.ch/evoting/english/welcome.asp (it does not talk about the criticisms, though).

Now, obviously, they can not link every citizen's computer with the central voting server with a quantum-encrypted link; here, they are just encrypting a 500 meters internal link between two servers of the State. This election does not use evoting; however, this is part of a general policy of showing "see, we do the best that's available, so our system is secure" -- they don't care about the fact that with evoting, the weakest link is the individual citizen's computer. Instead, they use quantum cryptography to protect an already secure link -- already secure, because votes are tabulated in the first center, so they get the results out from there on paper as well, which is pretty hard to hack...

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[Garridan]

Prepositions are totally fine to end sentences with.

Swiss and Finns

[KimmoV]

What have they ever done for Internet?? First WWW and now this with Swiss...Finns with their pesky IRC and the linux. Who do they think they are!?

Swiss, Finns, overlords...need I say more?

Do You Watch Them Count The Vote?

[logicnazi]

I doubt it. You trust the people to take the votes away somewhere and count them up. You probably don't have a clue who does the counting, where it is done, or how the counting machines work. I sure as hell don't.

The system we have now is just as non-transparent as all the good voting systems. The only real difference is that you are familiar and comfortable with one and not the other. That will change in time. Once various clever crypto systems become more familiar people won't need to look inside anymore than they need to know where their votes are counted. They will trust the assurances of people who do know that it all works.

Hell, with the right kind of homeomorphic encryption you can even verify that your vote was correctly counted, verify that it was included in the count correctly and pretty much see (with the help of a program) that everything went down as planned. Once people find this sort of computer aided crypto stuff more comfortabe it will be even more transparent than it is now.

Do you remember all the people who said they would never use ATMs b/c you didn't know how it worked and you didn't have a person there to be sure things didn't fuck up? Don't see many anymore.

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[ajs318]

But conjunctions aren't good to begin sentences with .....

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[Foole]

As Winston Churchill reputedly said: "This is the sort of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put."

Re:No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring i

[leonardluen]

more importantly, where do they keep all the cats in between elections???

Quantum Crypto is Snakeoil in this Case

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum Crypto is snakeoil in this case. First, the primary factor that distinguishes quantum crypto from regular crypto is that eavesdropping is detected and the link is shut down. What every defender of quantum crypto misses is that there are cases where breaking the communications link by attempting to eavesdrop is more valuable than actually eavesdropping.

For example, if quantum crypto is used to protect a vote as it travels on the wire, the attempt to read the vote will prevent it from reaching its target. This can potentially be more valuable than reading what people are voting - after all, the results of the vote are public anyway, and the people running the machines have access to the database of votes. This system can be abused very simply. Insert a device into the fiber from the voting machine to the main computer. When someone you don't want voting enters the booth, flip the switch and the voting computer loses its connection. Don't have the voting machine warn the user that it needs to reconnect and buffer the votes. Then, if you want to change the votes on a machine, go back before it sends its votes in and change them.

In short, quantum crypto buys you nothing other than a bulletpoint on a checklist and the confusion of legislators and directors of elections.

Mod the parent up.

[Vadim Makarov]

It's the only response in the entire discussion from someone who has a clue :)

How do they prevent voter fraud in

[Iowan41]

the other universes?

Re:No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring i

[Per Abrahamsen]

Is it you, Professor Farnsworth?

Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for
> election protection purposes. "We would like to provide optimal security
> conditions for the work of counting the ballots..."

Frank: Pssst! Got our moles in position?

Joe: Yep.

Election Official: Let the undefeatable election system counting commence!

Re:Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[fkamogee]

Replying to your sig. Two spaces after a period went out of style well before the interwebs went mainstream. It usually looks silly when using a variable-width font.

Re:Parent is an illiterate moron.

[gluechucker]

Don't end a sentence with the word "with!!!!!" Why not? You just did :). ... with.

Re:Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[shaiful]

how if we let to many noobs or stupid people vote?? they're goin to mess it up...dun u think so...