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Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols

Posted by timothy on from the visibility-rocks dept.

Hollow Being writes "In an essay posted to Threatpost, Bruce Schneier makes the argument that self-enforcing protocols are better suited to security and problem-solving. From the article: 'Self-enforcing protocols are safer than other types because participants don't gain an advantage from cheating. Modern voting systems are rife with the potential for cheating, but an open show of hands in a room — one that everyone in the room can count for himself — is self-enforcing. On the other hand, there's no secret ballot, late voters are potentially subjected to coercion, and it doesn't scale well to large elections. But there are mathematical election protocols that have self-enforcing properties, and some cryptographers have suggested their use in elections.'"

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Voting needs to be transparent by krappie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here is the solution to all voting problems.

    Goals:
    1. Confirm your vote is collected correctly.
    2. Try to assure the people that no votes were added.
    3. Don't hide results.
    4. Keep votes anonymous.

    Solution:
    1. Keep a large public vote database.
    2. Be able to Look up votes by voter id, county, polling location and time.
    3. Keep large visible clock and voter count at each polling station. Every time a person goes into the voting room, the count goes up. Voter counts can be confirmed online. Maybe even in a graph over time.

    The voter should be able to go online and see his own vote. Since every voter can see every vote counted up in every polling location in the country and know that everyone else can, they'll be assured of the results. If they're paranoid, they can watch their local polling station's voter count and confirm the published results don't have added votes.

    Note: Maybe instead of voter id's, it should be a random confirmation code thats generated on the spot. That should be even more anonymous.

    Problems: Some people actually vote for the wrong person on accident. That's unfortunate, but the solution isn't to hide it from them.
    If vote online doesn't match your vote, have a dispute process. Keep track of dispute counts over time, for the public to see.

  2. Maddison Warned about this by cs668 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    in the federalist papers:

    http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

    They thought about it, but free speech trumped the elimination of political parties. Always floors me how much foresight they had.