Five-College Speaker Series on Information Assurance
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Ben Adida |
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Only half of US Presidents have been elected via secret ballot; the first was Grover Cleveland in 1892. The secret ballot makes voting particularly challenging: how can the system convince Alice, the voter, of the correct capture and tally of her vote, while preventing her from proving the contents of her vote to a potential coercer? Current election systems effectively punt on the verifiability issue: Alice must trust the election officials to verify, on her behalf, that all ballots are appropriately collected, tallied, and reported. Cryptography can resolve this conundrum. We can give Alice direct assurance that her vote was captured, anonymized, and counted correctly, while simultaneously ensuring that she cannot convince a third party of the contents of her ballot. These techniques are heavily based on zero-knowledge proofs, where a Prover demonstrates to a Verifier the truthfulness of an assertion, and the Verifier learns nothing more than that single bit of information. In this talk, we cover the intuition and basics of zero-knowledge proofs. We show how they apply to multiple components of universally verifiable voting. Biography:Ben Adida is a graduate student in the Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT. His research applies cryptography to public policy problems, including notably voting, privacy-preserving digital signatures, and electronic health records. Ben is an associate of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, working on the StopBadware and Online Identity projects. When he's not working on crypto/security, Ben is the Creative Commons representative to the W3C, where he chairs the RDF-in-XHTML Task Force. | |