Cryptography nerd

Fediverse accounts;
@Natanael@slrpnk.net (main)
@Natanael@infosec.pub
@Natanael@lemmy.zip

Lemmy moderation account: @TrustedThirdParty@infosec.pub - !crypto@infosec.pub

@Natanael_L@mastodon.social

Bluesky: natanael.bsky.social

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2025

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  • The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there’s auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).

    You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can’t vote!

    It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it’s possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.


  • They’re implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.

    Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that’s simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can’t detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.