One of the world’s leading security organizations has voided the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost the encryption key needed to unlock the results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.
The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential and privacy-preserving manner. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that ensures that each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm that their ballot was counted fairly.
An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”
According to the bylaws of the association, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds one third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt the results.
“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has lost their private key, which is an honest but unfortunate human error, and therefore their decryption share cannot be calculated,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to receive or verify the final outcome of this election.”
To prevent a similar incident, IACR will adopt a new mechanism for managing private keys. Instead of requiring all three pieces of private key material, elections will now require only two. Trustee Moti Yung, who was unable to provide her third critical item, has resigned. Michel Abdullah is being replaced in his place.
IACR is a non-profit scientific organization that provides research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure in the presence of adversaries. The associate is organizing a new election that began Friday and will run through Dec. 20.