Theory and Practice of Cryptography

[4joules]

thanks for your video

[incogn1too]

Interesting would he still vote for obama :)))

[MichaelJE2]

This is an amazing talk, I'm a high school graduate, in my first year at college and I understood it very well. I'm a bit strange though, and have been interested in cryptography for a long time and have heard of a lot of the things he talks about.

[Quast]

That guy fascinates me. In some moments I feel remembered of Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly". ^^

[jesusisalive2]

there seems to be a lot of reliance on the existence of 'mutually distrustful' parties, specifically political parties - republicans, democrats, etc. What if, as many people suspect today, these parties are inherently NOT in disagreement in reality, although they act like the are in disagreement?  Does this very likely scenario cause a problem with this system?

[tricky778]

@jesusisalive2 If all the parties of the election are trying to rig it then who cares? At that point the vote is irrelevant.

[achan1058]

@jesusisalive2 I don't it would matter at that point. If all parties are colluding, you have much bigger problems than whether your vote is accurate and/or private.

[libertarianjury]

Everything this guy says is highly suspect. He wasn't smart enough to pick Paul over Obama! LOL. We need Sameer Parekh to give the talk again, and this time, include "none of the above" as an option in the talk.

[Strilanc]

@blenderpanzi Did you watch the whole talk?

The hardware does not have to be trusted, because the protocol it must follow is verifiable. Malicious hardware is detected by its verification-failing outputs, without any direct inspection required. You can even have someone you trust write a verifier if you don't trust the existing ones, since verification can be done by anyone.

Electronic voting can be more secure than paper ballots, by a lot.

[michalchik]

It looks cool, but I think it misses one essential feature of a voting system. People won't trust it because it is too complex and people won't aprrecaite when it breaks down. Do you think people will take to the streets demanding justice, if they here the mix master shadow check-sums are off? Will reporters even know to report that? It needs to be transparent simple and secure.

[jiminssy]

@michalchik People are getting educated more and more. What Newton had discovered centuries ago is being taught in high schools. This may seem very complex but there will be efforts to simplify it and teach this to kids in the future if it ever gets used and withstands the trial of time, like Newton's theories have. I agree with him where he said at the end, if entire process is opened to the public and learning the concepts from the books is the only thing stopping

[michalchik]

@jiminssy After several centuries of simplifying newtons ideas the average adults doesn't understand the laws of motion. It is taught in HS but 90% of the 40% that take the class never think about them after the class is over. Try this. Ask a bunch of people you know, what happens to the passengers of a car when the driver steps on the accelerator. Most will say, the passengers get pushed back into the seats. What the exhaust port on the death star was for, they won't say thrust.

[tricky778]

@michalchik it can't be all three of transparent, simple AND secure. your demand is irrelevant.

[michalchik]

@tricky778 What makes you think that? Paper ballots with open access to voting area, chain of custody and counting are transparent simple and secure. Numbered voting receipts that show running total counts rather than an individuals vote are simple, transparent and and secure since they allow two individuals to come together to make sure their counts jibe. Random seizure and testing of machines on voting day is simple, transparent and secure way to detect fraud. There are more.

[blenderpanzi]

It's much harder to manipulate a paper based election. You have to compromise a lot people at a lot of voting sites (is that the correct engl. term?). If you find a way to manipulate the software (in a way that it changes to the not compromised version after the election ended) you can manipulate a whole election with a single point of failure. So instead of O(n*m) (n=voting sites, m=people there) the costs of your manipulation is O(1).

[blenderpanzi]

Even if the system is open source, even if the cryptography is sound, how can a non-computer expert verify it works correctly on election day? How can a computer expert know that the right unmodified code is running on the voting computer at election day?

[tricky778]

@blenderpanzi The voter has their own computer - the voter has data on the ballot that their own device can verify the vote with. the candidates can verify the tally with their own devices, etc.

[blenderpanzi]

... If before the election the box is empty you can just sit there in the room with the box and watch. Every person puts one vote in it and afterwards you can check if the votes taken out are counted correctly. You can't do that with a machine. You cannot look inside a computer and see how the bits are copied from one register to another. There is no way electronic voting is democratic. For the shake of democracy, count manually, no matter how long it takes! Democracy is worth it.

[blenderpanzi]

I'm just at 0:19:12 so I don't know what else he will talk about but so far he says you can make secure and democratic elections using electronic systems. Well this is bulls**t. There are certain properties of democratic elections not even mechanical voting systems can satisfy. EVERYONE has to be able to understand the election process, not just experts like us computer scientists. If it is just a box where you put paper votes into everyone can comprehend how it works. ...

[DerOliverJose]

les suguiero poner subtitulos en español gracias.

[KG84C]

Don't vote, it just encourages them !

From your friendly neighborhood dedicated loop encryption device

[shaikhsayfunnabiy]

Ancient example of cryptography can be found in the Qur'an. Letters > numbers > addition > break down into addends > reconvert into letters with different meaning

[Wwallace67]

If only Ron Paul had actually won the nomination....

Good video otherwise.

[jr3470]

my friend that's 15 wrote it in LSL language o_o and i still don't really know what it is just something that hides your password

[5pl005hProductions]

lul nubs don't understand what u mean (jr is my old account ;)

[StephenWeis]

As a follow up, Ben has built his voter-verifiable voting system on the web. Look for Helios Voting.

[polarbear60]

You asshole! You are talking about voting and you have a preference? Where is your integrity!!!

[kimshepherd]

Excellent video, way better than hearing about Alice and Bob and Eve again... great examples, great ideas, great explanations.

[AllAboutVoting]

I really enjoyed this talk.

[StephenWeis]

Excellent talk.

[kimshepherd]

:)

Quick question: I wonder whether it would be dangerous to rely on one centralised website or 'bulletin board', to avoid coercers taking over a university or ISP proxy server and fooling many voters into thinking their votes are corrupted...

How important is the bulletin board itself in the overall auditing scheme?

[StephenWeis]

There doesn't have to be one centralized bulletin board. The key property Ben is trying to get at with the bulletin board analogy is that voters can go and check that their encrypted ballot appears in some publicly accessible repository, which may be distributed.

If the vote does not appear, then the voter will have a receipt that they can turn over to an investigative agency.

Denial of service, like in the example you give, is always a risk, but can be detected and prevented.