04 Dec 2014 - David Bernhard

Abstract

I present a cryptographer's view of recent developments in electronic voting - and what I've learned from non-cryptographers.

Voting protocols such as Helios aim to offer publicly verifiable voting: no-one needs to trust the vote-counters, everyone can audit the election result and at the same time, no-one's vote is revealed to anyone else.

The first part of my talk will introduce cryptographic voting and the work I have done in the past four years on the subject. The key feature of my work is constructing mathematical security models for properties such as privacy and proving that (approximations of) real-world schemes satisfy these models.

In the second part of my talk I will take a critical look at some of the cryptographic ideas relating to voting based on my experiences talking with non-cryptographers at voting-related events. I conclude that the best way to advance cryptographic voting may well be for cryptographers to take a step back and hand over the baton - reader, it's yours to take!