[p2p-hackers] cryptocounters for our PETs

Alfonso De Gregorio adg at crypto.lo.gy
Sat Nov 26 02:48:30 PST 2011


Hi David,

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:48 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett at 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
>
>
>
> -- Sent from my Palm Pre

Cheers,

-- alfonso     blogs at http://Plaintext.crypto.lo.gy   tweets @secYOUre
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