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How Blockchain Could Save Voting? - DTNS WEEKLY TECH UPDATE 8/2/2018 (Patreon)
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Alternatom is taking a break this week. His unreasonable anger shall return in future issues. This week I was inspired by my sister to research a little on how blockchain might improve voting.
(My sister is County Clerk and Recorder for Bond County, Illinois. County Clerks oversee elections. And liquor licenses. And a lot of other stuff but for our purposes elections is the important one.)
HOW BLOCKCHAIN COULD HELP VOTING -
This past May, West Virginia tested using a blockchain-based system to let service members vote absentee in its primary. Blockchain-based voting methods are also being tried in many other parts of the world, including Brazil, Denmark, South Korea, Switzerland, and of course the most cutting edge tech country on the planet, Estonia.
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/05a369
How does it work?
Well it needs to do all the things voting requires
- Registration
- Vote casting
- Vote anonymity, counting and auditing
Registration
A citizen would register to vote in the normal ways by showing ID and proof residency and then their identity would be associated with a user key. In many ways it would be similar to any other form of user identification like you have at bank. For security you would probably implement two-factor authentication of some sort and possibly associate the account with fingerprint or facial ID on a phone.
Voting
Next a citizen would get a voting token. Likely they'd get many of them but let's deal with one for one vote to keep things simple. The token would have a time limit so it couldn't be used in future elections.
To vote, as far as the voter is concerned they would just see a nice interface where they would chose a candidate. The software however would send a token to an address associated with the selected candidate.
Here's where the benefits kick in. That vote is now publicly verifiable on the blockchain in a way that effectively cannot be tampered. It's much more secure than a paper ballot. It's reproduced on multiple nodes (if the blockchain is implemented right) so it's not going to get lost. It's also not stored on one server that could get hacked and altered. It's mathematically "chained" so it's accurate.(If you want to dig in more about how blockchain works this is a great explanation from our old buddy Jonathan Strickland: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/blockchain-technology-ready-to-disrupt-world.htm )
It's all the things we want in a voting system-- except you may be fixated on that word public.
Vote anonymity, counting, auditing
How do we keep all the benefits of a publicly verifiable and auditable blockchain of votes without revealing the identity of who voted for what?
This is the tricky part. We need to be able to maintain verification of true identity while maintaining true anonymity.
This is not impossible. The trick is how you implement it.
There are ways to prove that a voter is verified without revealing who it is. You use a method to prove something is true without showing what the something is. There are several sounds ways to do that. If you're having a hard time wrapping your head around how that could be AT ALL possible, let's use an example related to something called a zero-knowledge proof. This will show you how, in concept, it's possible to prove something is true without revealing the data.
Imagine Peggy has uncovered a secret word to open a door. Victor doesn't believe her. Peggy wants to prove she knows it without telling him what the word is. The door is at one end of a circular path. At the other side of the circle from the door, Victor and Peggy stand. Victor stays there and can't see the door or hear Peggy when she's there. So Peggy walks around the circle, whispers the secret word, opens the door and walks up the other side of the circle. This proves to Victor that she knows the word that opens the door, otherwise she would have have to come back the same way she had gone.
Yes it's silly to build a circular path with a magic door that only opens to let you walk back out. I know. It's a metaphor, just roll with it. Also, to you, the screaming security professional over insisting that there's more to this to make it truly zero knowledge, relax. We're just trying to introduce the concept for now. You can explain all about the path not being exactly circular and video cameras and all that if they really want to dig in later. Try this Wikipedia article for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
The point is, there is math that can carry out the robust code-based version of the magic door, in a blockchain, so that you can verify that a vote is from one registered voter without knowing who the voter is. But it's not easy.
tl;dr; If you want to sound smart at your next County Clerk's cocktail party, say, "Blockchain voting could really solve a lot of our voting issues if they could just nail down the encryption to protect anonymity." You'll drink free the rest of the night! Maybe.
WHY do we need this? Paper seems fine.
Why go to all this trouble? Is it just so I can vote on my phone?
Well no. Though that could increase voter turnout. And you could even use blockchain systems at polling places as long as you have well-secured devices.
The big benefit, if it all gets working, is transparency. As a citizen, you cannot see the paper ballots they are counted. Well most of you can't. The rooms just aren't very big. But with blockchain, all of you could. Multiple people could observe the voting without violating security or anonymity. That reduces fraud and increases accuracy.
It's likely that the encryption problem will get solved it's just a matter of when. Until then, we'll keep testing it out and see how it goes.
SELECTED TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK
Samsung posted its slowest quarterly profit growth yet. Chip sales returned record profits. The problem is Mobile. The S9 fell short of sales targets and mobile showed its steepest operating profit decline since Q1 2017 at 34%.
Sony tells a similar story. Its PS4 console brought in more than twice as much money as any other department. Sony Music, home entertainment and sound and image sensors all did well. Smartphones however, lost Sony $97 million and its not expected to get better.
On the other hand, Huawei posted a revenue rise of 15% on the half year and operating profit rise of 14%. While that's the slowest growth in its first half sales since 2013, it came while being pushed out of the US and Australia and expanding its marketshare in China to a record 27 percent.
More affordable Chinese phones are pressuring margins. Cheaper phones have better design and hardware. Samsung is pinning it hopes on foldable phones.
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https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/31/sony-playstation-4-millions/
Apple became the world's only trillion dollar publicly traded company on Thursday, in terms of market capitalization, when Apple's stock price hit $207.05 before dipping below $207 and going back to very high billion status. Apple's stock has appreciated over eight percent since tApple announced its latest earnings results on Tuesday. Apple set a new fiscal third quarter record with $53.3 billion revenue and strong iPhone X sales.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/02/apple-now-a-trillion-dollar-company/
Twitter reported monthly active users fell by 1 million as it removed bots and spam and failed to attract new users. Twitter says user numbers will continue to fall this year because of that. Twitter says it is prioritizing cleaning up the platform over near-term product improvements that could drive usage. Twitters daily active users were up 11 percent, the 7th quarter in a row of growth. Twitter also reported its third straight quarter of positive income at $100 million. For the first time overseas revenue contributed the majority of Twitter's ad sales.
https://www.recode.net/2018/7/27/17621090/twitter-health-user-growth-q2-earnings-2018-jack-dorsey
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We've been following the MoviePass saga this past week as it borrowed $6 million in an emergency, shut down access to Mission Impossible: Fallout, claimed technical issues as a reason for purchase issues and finally raised its monthly price and announced it will be reducing availability of tickets to big new releases. Mitch Lowe, CEO of MoviePass sent out a note to customers noting all this stuff, apologizing and saying "access to immediate support may become limited.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4193060-helios-and-matheson-analytics-just-change-game
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced it has successfully tracked a batch of 17,000 kilograms of almonds from Australia to Germany using a private blockchain built on the Ethereum network. The bank's partners could check in on the location, temperature, humidity, and other metrics of the shipment, whenever they wanted, in real-time.
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/07/30/blockchain-cryptocurrency-banks-tracking/
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