One of the foremost security organizations globally has annulled the results of its yearly leadership election after an official mislaid an encryption key required to access results maintained in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.
The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) announced on Friday that the votes were collected and counted via Helios, an open-source voting system that employs peer-reviewed cryptography to ensure votes are cast and counted in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-respecting manner. Helios encrypts every vote in such a way that guarantees each ballot remains secret. Additional cryptographic methods utilized by Helios enable each voter to verify that their ballot was counted accurately.
A “truthful yet regrettable human error”
According to the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee serve as independent trustees. To avoid collusion between two of them to manipulate the results, each trustee possesses a third of the cryptographic key material necessary for decrypting the results.
“Regrettably, one of the three trustees has permanently mislaid their private key, a truthful yet regrettable human error, and thus cannot compute their share of the decryption,” stated the IACR. “Consequently, Helios cannot finalize the decryption process, and it is technically unfeasible for us to ascertain or verify the final outcome of this election.”
To avert a similar occurrence, the IACR will implement a new method for managing private keys. Elections will now only require two portions of the private key material instead of all three. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to produce his share of the key material, has stepped down. He will be succeeded by Michel Abdalla.
The IACR is a nonprofit scientific body dedicated to research in cryptology and related disciplines. Cryptology is the science and art of creating computation and communication systems that remain secure against adversarial threats. The association is conducting a new election that commenced on Friday and will continue until December 20.
