One in all the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the outcomes of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.
The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to solid and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography utilized by Helios allows each voter to verify their ballot was counted fairly.
An “honest but unlucky human mistake”
Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To forestall two of them from colluding to cook the outcomes, each trustee holds a 3rd of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.
“Unfortunately, considered one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unlucky human mistake, and due to this fact cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “Because of this, Helios is unable to finish the decryption process, and it’s technically unimaginable for us to acquire or confirm the ultimate end result of this election.”
To forestall the same incident, the IACR will adopt a brand new mechanism for managing private keys. As a substitute of requiring all three chunks of personal key material, elections will now require only two. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to offer his third of the important thing material, has resigned. He’s being replaced by Michel Abdalla.
The IACR is a nonprofit scientific organization providing research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure within the presence of adversaries. The associate is holding a brand new election that began Friday and runs through December 20.
