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

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

[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.

Quantum Voting by Stalin

[Gothmolly]

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

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.

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: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: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.