Re: Ballots and one way hashes
On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 04:55:35PM -0800, Robert Woodcock wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 12:27:11AM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > Eh, the buyer can demand proof, the same proof a voter has to verify his
> > vote is tallied: ask the secret token. Assuming md5 is a strong hash,
> > this way a voter can prove his/her ballot if (s)he wishes to publicly
> > (or privately) show to have voted in a given way.
>
> One-way hashes of whatever algorithm are quite pointless with only a couple
> million combinations (only 5040 combinations if you don't mark any choices
> equally and don't leave any choices blank).
Eh, I see you didn't vote yet, but the way it works in Debian, with a
14-character alphanumeric token & your login, it works fine. Note that
not your vote is one-way hashed (then you have no way to check the
secretary on whether the votes are correctly tallied), but just the hash
next to your vote. See the 2004 DPL elections[1] for how this looks like.
Without the token, you cannot look up which vote is who's, but with a
token, you, and anyone you give the token, can find out what vote was
tallied of yourself. And assuming collisions happen with probability
zero, the md5sum is unique too.
--Jeroen
[1] http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/leader2004_tally.txt
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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