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Today the Swiss Federal Council delayed introduction of evoting as a regular voting channel citing the many flaws found & documented in the Scytl/Swiss Post system.
You can read the reports by @VTeagueAus, Olivier Pereira & myself in the links in this tweet:
You can read the reports by @VTeagueAus, Olivier Pereira & myself in the links in this tweet:
We spent a good 4-5 days painstakingly tearing down and getting the Scytl / Swiss Post code to run to demonstrate a critical flaw in their Shuffle Proof. We provided Swiss Post with fraud proofs that "proved" that modified votes had not been modified.
We also found flaws in every other ZKP construction - some unused, some more academic than practical, & one which led to the discovery of a flaw in the *existing* in-use system - breaking individual verifiability.
Swiss Post suspended the system.
post.ch/en/about-us/co…
Swiss Post suspended the system.
post.ch/en/about-us/co…
Also during all this there was an election going on in Australia, and Scytl felt the need to issue an emergency patch *during an an election* because of the vulnerability.
Scytl maintains their other systems are not impacted by the flaws we found.
computerworld.com.au/article/658709…
Scytl maintains their other systems are not impacted by the flaws we found.
computerworld.com.au/article/658709…
Swiss Post received a lot of great PR when they announced their $150,000 bug bounty. They ended up paying a tiny % of that out (& last I checked, @OpenPriv were still waiting on the payment of my share of the 5000 francs that SwissPost offered us)
Hope that PR was worth it.
Hope that PR was worth it.
I won't pretend to understand Swiss politic (I hope someone like @adfichter can correct me) but I believe it is still possible that Swiss Post can offer it's system to the Cantons? But the tide has significantly turned against e-voting, so adoption is unlikely for now?
If you are looking for a moral of this story, my favorite is this. A group of underfunded, sleep deprived researchers with limited resources can find multiple critical flaws in a "state-of-the-art" e-voting system. Good luck with e-voting.
To close off this thread some source links of today;s announcement: admin.ch/gov/en/start/d…
For many this move doesn't go far enough, and I'd agree that if a Scytl system is allowed anywhere near a swiss election in the near future it would be a failure of democratic accountability. There are still many questions that need public answers. e-voting-moratorium.ch/vorlaeufiger-v…
Personally, I don't think Scytl should be allowed near any democracy until we understand exactly why their "state of the art" system had so many critical flaws:
When planes fail we expect that there are detailed inquiries into the failures - it is the core reason why flying is so safe, a history of competent forensic investigation that radically identifies and shapes processes.
Democracy seems important enough to warrant the same.
Democracy seems important enough to warrant the same.
