Computer Science
Tel-Aviv University

0368.3500
Electronic voting

Fall 2007

 

Lecturer: Amnon Ta-Shma

T.A.: Ido Ben Eliezer – idobene at post dot tau dot ac dot il

When:  Tuesdays, 10:10-12:00.

Schedule

Date

First meeting. Background. DLOG. ElGamal. Zero-knowledge proofs.

Jan 22

Second meeting.

  • Assigning projects.

  • ZKP for DLOG. Chaum-Pedersen.

  • Non-interactive proofs.

  • Threshold cryptography using ElGamal encryption.



Fab 12

Submitting first design (Modules, interface, main algorithms).

Feb 19

Final design. A short presentation of main algorithms.

Feb 26

Design presentation.

March 11

submission – first round.

March 25

Final submission

 

Projects:

·         Prêt à Vote   Technical report, Wiki page (2 candidates). - רוזה, יוני, שי, עדי

·         Three Ballot and VAV. Ronald L. Rivest, Warren D. Smith PDF | HTML. - עודד, ינון

·         A combination of paper voting and cryptographic voting (k candidates). - סמדר, דנה, רביב, רון

·         Paillier homomorphic encryption. The original paper. - יובל

Technical references:

· A nice online book with very good number theory background: http://shoup.net/ntb/
· A paper regarding non-interactive ZKP for signatures: Amos Fiat and Adi Shamir ,
 How to prove yourself: practical solutions to identification and signature problems Source 
· A paper regarding threshold encryption. T. P. Pederson, 
Threshold cryptosystem without a trusted party



General references:

· A NY Times article. 8/1/2008.
· Felten's testimony before the Congress, 2007.
· Freedom to tinker.

FAQ from past year (answers by Oded Schwartz and Ben Riva)

 

Q1

Should we describe the ZKP needed in our project?

 

Yes.

Q2

What is the coverage of the design (e.g. how many pages are expected?)

 

The design should be such that it is clear to us (and to you) what you are going to do. It should be only a few pages long, but it should contain, for each part of your project:
- A description of the interface (UI and/or software interface, whichever is relevant).
- A short explanation of which algorithm(s) you use. If you choose from a few options explain your choice.
- What are the algorithm's main building blocks, functions and data-structures and how they interact.

Q3

How do we know for sure on which elements one may trust (e.g, maybe the public board show a copy of your vote, then later changes it to something else)?

 

Actually you don't. You should write in your design a short section describing the trust issue (i.e, what one has to trust so that we know the system works properly).

Q4

How do we do a non-interactive ZKP?

 

The method we use is called Fiat-Shamir heuristic (or method) because it is not proven (see link above). In their paper they presented a signature protocol which uses it, and on the way,
they present the novel idea of using hash function instead of a challenge. That is why this paper is cited in every paper which use this method (even though it doesn't generally talk about Non-Interactive-ZKP).

Q5

Which hash should we use in practice for the non-interactive ZK signature?

 

 
I dont think it really matters which hash you use. I basically like MD5 (Pseudocode and nice info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5). Also, you can google "md5 implementation" and find it implemented in any language.
SHA-1 is also good (again, wiki is a good start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1).
Moreover, There are many implementations of other methods like in
http://www.partow.net/programming/hashfunctions/

You just need to choose and google a little.

Q6

Is there an example of a practical use of the Fiat-Shamir paper?

 

 
There are few follow up papers which mention some theoretic problems in this method
(like - http://www.mit.edu/~tauman/fiatshamirshort.pdf), but for specific uses
(mainly signatures or voting protocols) it is common to use it (like CGF97).

Q7

How can we generate a large prime with the respective generator?

 

 
Corrected answer:
 
Finding general large primes and generators is not an easy task, but, finding a specific kinds is an easier problem. 
 
Usually we use p = 2q + 1 as our primes (where p,q are primes), and then we can find a generator by:
while 1
 choose a random number x
 if x^2 != 1 (mod p) and x^q != 1 (mod p)
 return x
See, for example, slides 5-6 at:
http://www.pinkas.net/teaching/itc/2005/lectures/lecture6.pdf

Q8

We have problems finding libraries which support large numbers on the one hand, and UI on the other hand, and can be easily compiled together.

 

A few suggestions:
For Java: IIRC Java has it's own, built-in BigNumber library. 

For C/C++ programs, you may want to use the GMP library. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't compile all that well with MSVC 

(it is possible, but really it's a lot easier to use on linux/unix systems).

To make the UI programming easier, You may use a web-based solution: the UI
is programmed in PHP. PHP has modules for GMP and MySQL databases, and
it's very easy to learn (especially if you already know C or Java). 

The only glaring omission is secure random number generation.
If you run the webserver on linux, you can bypass that by reading from

/dev/random or /dev/urandom.  You can see an example server at
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~talm/voting/

where there is also a link to the source code. Other suggestions are Crypto++ and MIRACL. You may also search for “big integers” on google.

Q9