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Cryptology firm cancels elections after losing encryption key

18 points| tagawa | 3 months ago |bbc.com

21 comments

order

sschueller|3 months ago

Some things just work, like paper ballots. No reason to re-invent the wheel or to "verschlimmbessern" what works.

We vote a lot in Switzerland on a lot of issues but we do so on paper ballots which we can either drop directly in the box or send in the post. When there is a close vote the maximum wait for a result is usually around 4-5 hours so that isn't really an issue either. Counting is a highly distributed effort and IMO that also reduces the risk for large scale fraud.

scotty79|3 months ago

It absolutely doesn't work. All paper elections have some (acceptable and accepted) level of fraud. We should move to mathematical system, that still uses paper but let's the voter confirm that thier vote was properly counted. There was a TED presentation about this many years ago.

pxeger1|3 months ago

Why does the IACR use the term "cryptology" rather than "cryptography"?

tptacek|3 months ago

Cryptology is the science, cryptography the practice.

stavros|3 months ago

It sounds like "3 out of 3" is too risky, as you're basically tripling the risk of losing a key (but you're reducing the risk of compromise). Something like "3 out of 4" would have been a better balance, in my opinion, but I think there were technical issues in requiring such a quorum (I think I read that the encryption scheme didn't support it, but don't quote me).

glitchc|3 months ago

This headline is incorrect, elections were rescheduled, not canceled.

potato3732842|3 months ago

Better than losing the key and finding a "workaround" I guess.