The Evolution of Pret a Voter

  • Peter Ryan | University of Luxembourg

The challenge of making elections demonstrably accurate while guaranteeing ballot secrecy with minimal trust assumptions has been taken up by the crypto/security community. One of the approaches is the “Pret a Voter” concept, in which the vote is encoded by randomising the order of candidates. In this talk I will outline the Pret a Voter concept and describe its development over the roughly eight years since its inception. The design has evolved in the face of newly identified threats, advances in cryptographic primitives and demands for greater flexibility and efficiency. I will also outline the Pretty Good Democracy scheme and the incorporation of ideas from PGD in Pret a Voter, giving rise to Pret a Voter with Confirmation Codes.

Speaker Details

Peter Ryan is Professor of Applied Security at the University of Luxembourg. He has over 20 years of experience in information assurance and formal verification. He pioneered the application of process algebras to modelling and analysis of secure systems and initiated and led the project that pioneered the application of process algebra (CSP) and model-checking to the analysis of security protocols. He has published extensively on cryptography, cryptographic protocols, mathematical models of computer security and, most recently, high assurance voting systems. He is the creator of Prêt à Voter, Pretty Good Democracy (with Vanessa Teague) and OpenVote (with Feng Hoa) verifiable voting schemes. Prior to joining the University of Luxembourg, he was a Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University. He has worked at GCHQ, the Defence Research Agency, the Stanford Research Institute in Cambridge and the Software Engineering Institute, CMU Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD in mathematical physics from the University of London.

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      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks