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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I don't quite understand your reasoning here. What quality of crypto voting secures it? It's still software running on a client or server, yeah?

No, it is the math that works regardless of the security of the individual components.

If I send an encrypted message over an unsecured wire, and someone else shows up and says "oh but what if someone interferes with the unsecured wire?" they are missing the first part of understanding.

Each E2E system has its tradeoffs, but in general they are designed to absolutely detect if the people running the system deliberately messing with your vote. Detecting accidental messing with your vote is a necessary side-effect.

Ok, but merely securing the wire isn't impressive or going to solve the problem.

merely securing the wire

You still are not getting it.

WE

DO

NOT

CARE

ABOUT

SECURING

THE

WIRE.

The assumption is that the fire is compromised as fuck. Not only monitored by the enemy, but in complete control of the enemy.

What is secure in this scenario?

In an E2E voting scenario, the design goal is (more or less, there are different systems) that you have the math so you can sit at home and verify that your vote was counted, often without anyone else being able to verify how you voted, and even if the people who are running the election are trying to screw you over.

So surveiling the user is trivial (own user's device) and your accountability system relies on end users independently confirming the success of their submissions (possibly using previously owned devices.) Sounds like the only plausible accountability comes from terminally online math enthusiasts who we already don't listen to.

I already told you that I am skeptical of crypto-voting systems especially because of user education so switching from "lol what about zero days" to "lol math nerds!" is not really responsive to anything I said.

See https://www.themotte.org/post/86/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/11192?context=8#context

But if aliens showed up and said they would drop rocks on us if we did not implement an E2E voting everywhere in the country within 20 years, we absolutely could do it, and it would be pretty secure.

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