Hi David, On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:48 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett@quinthar.com> wrote:

That's interesting! Can you give a bit more information about it's use for secure voting?

Absolutely, thanks for asking. Cryptographic counters were introduced by Jonathan Katz, Steven Myers, and Rafail Ostrovsky in a work where they especially addressed their applications to electronic voting. So, I suppose its relevance makes the paper a good candidate for a reference: 'Cryptographic Counters and Applications to Electronic Voting', Eurocrypt 2001, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.52 Though cryptocounters may find application as subroutines in electronic voting system (more below), the possibility to use them as useful building blocks ultimately depends upon the requirements engineering for electronic vote (e.g., is coercion resistance a requirement?)

(I think there is a typo in the blog post around the word "addend", or that's a word I don't recognize -- it's key to that sentence, which itself is the key sentence of that section -- so I'm left confused.)

Sorry for the confusion. Let me rephrase the section. Lets consider a secure electronic voting where each participant holds a binary vote, which is either 0 or 1. We want to compute the tally without revealing the individual votes. A secure protocol to compute the sum of integers can be of help here. Votes, actually their randomized encryptions, are terms of the addition. The addition can be computed privately using an additive homomorphic cryptographic scheme, hence providing means to privately cast the participants' votes. To compute the tally, the voting authority -- which may inlcude participants themselves -- decrypt the cryptographic counter and publish the final result.

I'd love more information on the real world applications of this interesting concept. Thanks!

Lately, I've been working with a company interested in applying cryptocounters and building an application where privacy is taken care of by design. I'll do my best to help them delivering their project. Perhaps they will decide to write something about this in the future. At the same time, there are few application of cryptocounters, unrelated to electronic voting and my current engagements, suggested by Adam Young and Moti Yung in their Malicious Cryptography (J. Wiley) and the upcoming Advances in Cryptovirology http://www.cryptovirology.com/ But I'm pretty confident we could devise more applications. Thanks!

-david

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