Schneier On Self-Enforcing Protocols

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.'"

Comments

Re:You need trust

[eoin_tbo]

In high school I was teached that every happy customer tells about their good experience to 3-4 people, but every unhappy customer tells about it to 20 people.

Were you teached to wrote english too? Self limiting protocols are useful only for small scale solutions when it is reasonably possible to validate the results (are you going to be able to review the votes of 1,000 plus voters in a useful timescale) and where there is no penalty to having decisions an actors decisions being public knowledge.