ACE-CSR Seminar: Ballot Privacy

Speaker: Dr David Bernhard , University of Bristol
UCL Contact: Essam Ghadafi (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 26 May 16, 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Roberts 110

Abstract

In 2008, the Catholic University of Louvain elected a new president using Helios, a cryptographic online voting system. Since 2010 the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research) has used Helios to elect its board.
Is Helios secure? I focus on one property of electronic voting schemes, Ballot Privacy, which I helped formalise (Esorics 2011) and used to find a flaw in Helios (Asiacrypt 2012) and how the definition has evolved since (IEEE S&P 2015). Along the way I'll give my views on the question: what makes a good (cryptographic) definition of privacy and why should we trust it?

Dr David Bernhard

David Bernhard is a Senior Teaching Associate at the University of Bristol where he gained a PhD in Cryptography on "Zero-Knowledge proofs in theory and practice". Highlights of his research include helping to define a cryptographic model of ballot privacy, placing the security analysis of voting schemes on a solid cryptographic foundation; breaking the voting scheme used by the IACR and leading a research collaboration providing new insights into an old open problem in cryptography, the security of Signed ElGamal encryption.