Re: Election status
On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 02:27:28PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >>"Sven" == Sven <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> writes:
>
> Sven> Was this md5sum not supposed to be sent in the aknowledgement
>
> ``Supposed'' to be? I don't think that it was decided to
> modify the vote system, no. The best I recall is some discussion last
> year about secret ballot protocols, but that is as far as it went.
Well, i did not yet receive any kind of aknowledgement for my vote, but as i
understood, it should contain some kind of id or something which i can use to
check that the voting script did its job right.
And the problem is not so much to check that there is not some evil intention
on the vote-master's part or something such, just to check that the voting
script did not misfire.
> Sven> mail of the ballot, so it would only be comparing two md5sums,
> Sven> quite easy to do. Two cut&pastes should do the job, nothing
> Sven> arcane involved here ?
>
> And, of course, you then lose the benefit of having the
> md5sums, since I could slip the same md5sum to more than one
> person. I guess it would still be a deterrent, since I would never
> know who all did not really check the md5sum.
Yes, sure, but that is the real problem.
> Is it really that hard to run md5sum? Can we really survive as
> a project if the developers feel that way?
>
> Allow me to demonstrate. (Note: since my userid is
> srivasta, and if my secret token was 0123456789ABXDE, then i get:
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> % echo "srivasta 0123456789ABXDE" | md5sum
> f305c07513500e690a7f98f10c52a7fc
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> I can even do this:
> % egrep $(echo "srivasta 0123456789ABXDE" | md5sum) tally.txt
> and see that my vote is valid.
Ok, no problem, ....
The difficulty is that we are speaking about id + vote + secret word, and that
the way of concatenating them is not clear.
There would be a difference between :
% echo "srivasta 0123456789ABXDE" | md5sum
f305c07513500e690a7f98f10c52a7fc
and
% echo "srivasta0123456789ABXDE" | md5sum
3fd531504123df0165a3be23f4d8a33d
Now, what about the vote part, should i use the whole text of my signed
ballot, the unsigned version, (which will yield a multiline text part to
md5sum) or a simple shortcut thereof. Or maybe we should forget about this
part ?
> How hard was that?
>
> I guess I'll change the ack to put i a command line. I am not
> going to ship the md5sum in the ack, so there.
The main problem here is what exactly we are to md5sum, not the fact that we
shall md5sum something.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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