[E-voting] encryption compromised by hardware

[Patrick J Kobly]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Monday 20 November 2006 12:47, jm at jmason.org wrote:
>   
>> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210 -- Ken Thompson, _Reflections
>> on Trusting Trust_ ;)
>>     
> One has to be a member of ACM to access this.
> However, I remember reading it many years ago and finding it interesting
> and instructive.
>   
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

Is a publicly accessible copy of the work.  This is a very instructive 
work that should be read by anyone working on e-voting issues.  Though 
not saying anything direct about e-voting, it does raise the one 
fundamental flaw of any e-voting system without independent audit 
capability (voter verified audit trail that is actually audited).  This 
is the huge assumption made by most cryptographers developing 
crypto-protocols for reliable e-voting.  The assumption is that the 
system the user interacts with acts as a faithful agent of the user with 
respect to encrypting, recording and displaying vote data.  Thompson 
talks about why this assumption cannot be made (and in general any proof 
is illusory).

PK