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by mspecter 2286 days ago
That's a wonderful question.

The honest answer is that I have no idea. In the version we reverse engineered, there's no proof of inclusion of any of the data in the blockchain in the client, and the receipt system was via a PDF. The vote selections (ballot?) are also never signed by the client.

It's also worth noting that, according to the ToB article, the backend blockchain is a permissioned hyperledger instance, which runs PBFT[1] rather than proof of work. PBFT is controllable with roughly 1/3 of the network, 100% of which has been controlled by the company.

[1]http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf
1 comments
the_snooze 2286 days ago
Is there any technical/security benefit at all to private blockchains? Or even more generously, lightly-mined public blockchains? It seems that in either of those scenarios, you lose the decentralized validation and consensus brought about by a bunch of people incentivized to compete with one another to burn electricity.
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mspecter 2286 days ago
To push this further, I was working on a research paper with Ron Rivest, Neha Narula (head of MIT's decentralized currency initiative), and Sunoo Park (a wonderful applied cryptographer) on whether blockchains in general could be helpful in casting and tallying.

We're skeptical.

See: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

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eyegor 2286 days ago
But if everyone used a public blockchain, with proof of work + user-level signatures for each vote cast, wouldn't it be far more auditable than any current system? Ignoring implementation details, reaching a point where anyone could have a way to audit that their vote was counted (correctly) seems very useful. Using this sort of model, it theoretically wouldn't matter who completes the proof of work as long as the results are audited.
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baobabKoodaa 2286 days ago
You don't need blockchain to enable voters to verify "that their vote has been counted correctly". Several cryptographic voting schemes already provide this feature (for example, Civitas and Floating Receipts).
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nordsieck 2286 days ago
> Is there any technical/security benefit at all to private blockchains?

It really depends on what you want out of your blockchain.

For example, the backend of git is essentially a blockchain. It's extremely useful, even for a solo developer.

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