Ben Adida - MIT PhD Thesis Defense
Verifying Secret-Ballot Elections
with Cryptography
Thursday, June 22nd, 9am-10am
Patil/Kiva Conference Room (G449) (directions below)
Thesis Committee: Ronald L. Rivest, Srini Devadas, Shafi Goldwasser
In the US, the secret ballot is 115 years old: the first 23 Presidents were elected using public polling. Introduced to stem voter coercion, the secret ballot carries, to this day, a significant audit-ability and transparency cost: how can voters be given direct assurance of their vote without enabling coercion? Cryptography often solves problems with conflicting requirements: in this case , cryptography can fully reconcile ballot secrecy and election audit-ability.
This talk presents an overview of cryptographic voting techniques developed over the last 20 years and introduces two new ideas:
- Scratch & Vote, a practical, paper-based, cryptographic voting system that is particularly useful in illustrating the capabilities of cryptographic voting, and
- Public Mixing, a theoretical definition and construction that achieves anonymization (of votes, for example) through public computation.
This work asks "if crypto voting is so good, why aren't we using it yet?" and offers some tentative answers.
Directions to Kiva/Patil
- Enter Building 32, aka The Stata Center, at the corner of Vassar and Main in Cambridge.
- Look for the Gates Tower Elevators, which are near the information booth. Go to the 4th floor.
- Coming out of the elevators, take a right, and follow signs to Kiva/Patil, G449.