I’m giving a talk at Harvard CRCS, my new home, about the history of secure voting using cryptography. Here’s the full announcement:
CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Ben Adida, Harvard CRCS
Date: Wednesday, 27 September
Time: 12-1:30 (lunch provided)
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119 (one floor above ground level)Title: A Brief History of Secure Voting
Abstract:
Secret-ballot elections present a particularly fascinating design
challenge: Alice would like assurance that her vote “made it” into the
tally, yet she must be kept safe from undue influence. Interestingly, this means that Alice’s ballot must remain secret, even against her will. No common election technique, not even hand-counted paper ballots, successfully reconciles these two requirements. Typically, in order to achieve ballot secrecy, Alice loses the ability to directly verify the election. She must trust elections officials to preserve and count the ballots.In this talk, we discuss the history of cryptographic voting, the only known way to truly reconcile direct verifiability and ballot secrecy. We review techniques for incoercible ballot casting and verifiable ballot
anonymization. We also consider the latest paper-based cryptographic voting techniques, whose simplicity is particularly promising in educating the public about the power of cryptographic voting.
UPDATE: slight change in location for the talk (though there will be signs from the old location)
CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Ben Adida, Harvard CRCS
Date: Wednesday, 27 September
Time: 12-1:30 (lunch provided)
Place: Maxwell Dworkin, 2nd floor lounge (two flights up from ground level)Title: A Brief History of Secure Voting
Benlog 
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7 responses to “A Talk on the History of Cryptographic Voting”
[…] If any of my boston-area readers are interested in really secure electronic voting, my friend Ben Adida, whose recent PhD thesis was on cryptographic voting, is giving an ‘intro to cryptographic voting’ talk tomorrow at Hahvahd. Free lunch even, apparently, though if it is like most Harvard lunches you’ll want to get there a bit early 🙂 More details on Ben’s blog here. I haven’t heard Ben speak publicly on crypto-voting, but I have on other topics, and it has always been stimulating and educational, so I recommend it strongly if you’re interested in the topic. […]
Man, I wish our country was smaller so I could come see this…
Man, I wish our country was smaller so I could come see this…
Where is the video podcast located? :=)
Oh well, I’ll just read the paper :()
Joe:
Being on the other side of the atlantic doesn’t help either. Even if my country is tiny (Denmark)
Where is the video podcast located? :=)
Oh well, I’ll just read the paper :()
Joe:
Being on the other side of the atlantic doesn’t help either. Even if my country is tiny (Denmark)
Three of us from the Wellesley CS department were there. Unanimously, we found Ben to be clear, rehearsed and effective presentation (sadly, we did not understand part of Neff’s Incoercability ZK protocol: How and at which point in the protocol does Alice check that her vote is recorded correctly? )- one of the most comprehensible expositions I have attended. Great job!
Three of us from the Wellesley CS department were there. Unanimously, we found Ben to be clear, rehearsed and effective presentation (sadly, we did not understand part of Neff’s Incoercability ZK protocol: How and at which point in the protocol does Alice check that her vote is recorded correctly? )- one of the most comprehensible expositions I have attended. Great job!