Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 12:57 UTC

How to secure on-line voting?  

Dear Asgardians, as you know, we are all around the world.

As every democratic country, we will need to vote, and I feel concerned about helping to figure out how to allow every one to vote, securely.

We have some issues to resolve: - Authentication, how to authenticate ? - Integrity, how to secure my vote?

As you know, every one has a unique ID, but how to know if the voter is really who he say he is, and has not been "spoofed" ?

We should discuss about technologies we can/should use here.

For example, using blockchain, physical card to authenticate, SSL certificates....

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 19:23 UTC

Usually I would say as long as Asgardia can secure their emails the ID should be fine. But with all these people posting their ID's already I'm not sure if that's still enough. Using a physical "something" to prove identity comes with great expense. I don't think that is viable for the first voting.

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 19:35 UTC

I had the french government as client, and in their project they used pin cards and card readers, it comes with a price. We are not ready yet to afford this. Maybe using blockchain but again, and make it accessible for everyone ?

We have a long way before getting somewhere. For now email, id, password should suffice, I don't think other countries will launch hackers against us, yet.

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 19:44 UTC

May sound crazy, but wend something is more simple, it better work.

With voting the problem in all nations have been always THE SECRET.

Voting is a choose and if we take the "SECRET" out there is no chance of fraud.

If the vote list is online and we are able to see and check our vote online after we vote we will know if there is fraud or not, is some Asgardian say hey i dint vote for that, we will know about the fraud. Clear, everybody must be able to see the vote. Easy.

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 23:49 UTC

The solution to the problems you proposed is public key cryptography. You are actually already using it when going on Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc.

Basically, the idea is that two parties can communicate securely over an unsafe channel that is spyable upon (such as wifi). You can secure the communication with military grade algorithms as it is often advertised by certain companies, and in addition you can confirm that you are certainly talking to the designated person or server, and not somebody that may be eevesdropping on your communication and pretends to be the connection partner.

You pretty much can't decypher the encrypted messages within a reasonable amount of time.

Dec 22, 16 / Cap 21, 00 23:58 UTC

And Frederico, that is a bad idea. You need to have the priviledge to open secretly in a free state, you can read up on it online. In it's essence, who you're voting for is your concern and only your concern. It is your choice who you vote for, not the choice of some party that threatens people to some extent. You also shouldn't get influenced by your friends which may think different from you when voting for a certain party. Voting needs to be free, and secret ballots achieve this through privacy.

Dec 23, 16 / Cap 22, 00 09:28 UTC

Yeah I agree on public key, using SSL protocol ?

Dec 23, 16 / Cap 22, 00 14:41 UTC

+1 X.509

I did toy with the idea of embedding these into passports, locked with passphrase ofc, to prevent leaking the master key at border crossings.

It would be able to be used as a secured/authenticated ID mechanism, and provide for privacy.

Dec 26, 16 / Cap 25, 00 20:05 UTC

this is a good youtube video to look at: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI (if the link get blocked search into google: "computerphile digital voting") . Don't let this video discorage you, digivoting is going to be neccessary for our nation. . We would have to bear in mind that we need to watch out for people outside of our nation AND inside our nation. It may be hard to believe but Asguardia will change over time even if tits agains the initial will. . My opinion? send your votes to multiple machines: . Pros: if one vote databank is corrupted or attacked then other databanks work out what your vote would have been . Cons: Expensive? if your pc has been comprimised then your vote is lost. . There are more but I can't think straight today

  Last edited by:  Matthew Gould (Asgardian, Interest Mod)  on Dec 26, 16 / Cap 25, 00 20:08 UTC, Total number of edits: 2 times
Reason: Better formatting

Dec 29, 16 / Cap 28, 00 21:59 UTC

This is a topic that we can discuss for a long time the ideas or solutions of each one. But the reality is that it is impossible to be safe and secret by the simple fact of having an intermediary (computer in this case) that we can´t control.

If we want to have a secure vote can´t be secret, if we want it to be secret we can´t guarantee that it is safe

Dec 30, 16 / Cap 29, 00 02:47 UTC

Actually you can ratify security and privacy....

All traffic encrypted prevents snooping. If done correctly. When it comes down to the machine itself, one can obtain a unique cryptographic token, only able to be used once, and once you've used it the system will not generate you another. This token can then be used to access the voting system. User votes, token revoked. Only valid ID's will generate tokens.

If you don't keep any record of the link between ID/token - only that the ID has/hasn't used a token - then it's impossible to corrolate the token to ID.

Dec 30, 16 / Cap 29, 00 06:09 UTC

EyeR,

I think that idea might work. There would be the problem of individuals have there token stolen before they vote but even if this happens it would not be enough to skew the outcome in any way.

If by some chance enough tokens were stolen from individuals that it would skew the outcome of the vote then I think we would all hear about it and then we could consider the vote to be invalid and try again.

Dec 31, 16 / Cap 30, 00 17:23 UTC

In my opinion, basic authentication with transparent voting results is a viable solution short term.

Inevitably Asgarida will be targeted by hackers. Information leaked by these attacks could be harmful and policticaly damaging to Asgaridans on Earth.

What if our citizenship cards were also a FIDO U2F device?

https://www.yubico.com/about/background/fido/

Jan 2, 17 / Aqu 02, 01 02:29 UTC

@EyeR, your technical statement is correct and strong enough to at least test it. But the problem of a vote is philosophical, not technical. I mean, who assures me that what you say to me is true? (Do not take it as an offense, it is not to doubt you in particular). At this point I have to end up "trusting" that you do what you say you do. That is when electronic vote ceases to be reliable as such.

That is why I say that basically we have to choose between the vote being secret or that it is safe.

Jan 2, 17 / Aqu 02, 01 06:24 UTC

The token and cfc are good ideas and this explains why we need a means of physical authentication as an identity with qr code or something. I believe that in the future our means of authentication will be our physical identity that by chance does not yet exist.