Are there any good general cryptographic protocols for groups taking group actions by formal consensus or voting rules? I'm thinking of a "distributed agent" that is empowered to do various things but which is activated only by a vote of its owners. This would be like a "Robo-moderator" for a newsgroup, or a "Robo-Personnel Administrator" for a company's Board of directors, or a "Robo-Rater" for a restaurant rating website, or.... Crucial facts about a protocol that does the right thing would be: 1) DOES NOT create any single priveleged user or machine. 2) Resistant to denial-of-service attacks and attempts to "stack the vote." (Requires user authentication) 3) No altered versions of the agent ought to be able to gather enough information to force an action as long as at least the majority of agents are unaltered. 4) Once a consensus is reached, a majority of the agents acting together should be able to take whatever action is found even if the dissenters' agents don't cooperate with them. (a consensus reassembles a key? But then that key can't be used again, what's the next key?) Bear