Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can't Decrypt the Results

Summary

For a group of the world’s top cryptology researchers, it was the kind of election you would expect. It was a secret digital ballot whose final tally could be decoded only by using three keys split among select election trustees.So secure was the annual contest to fill three director and four officer positions that when one trustee lost his cryptographic key to unlock the results, the error made it impossible.The group, the International Association of Cryptologic Research, or I.A.C.R., was left with no choice but to throw out the vote and call a new election.“Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally,” the group said in a memo on Friday. “We are deeply sorry for this failure and for the disruption it has caused.”The association said that in order to avoid the issue in the future, it would loosen its requirements, adopting a “2-out-of-3 threshold” for use of the decryption keys and circulating clear, written procedures for trustees to follow.The association, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., works to advance research in cryptology, the science of securing information through ciphers and codes. With thousands of members around the world — including regular, student and senior members — it publishes some of the top research in the field.The association held elections for various leadership posts including the presidency from Oct. 17 to Nov. 16. As it has for years, it used an electronic voting system called Helios, which is designed to be verifiable and less vulnerable than other methods to collusion and interference. The system encrypts each vote and is “voter verifiable,” allowing people to track their ballots.After this year’s vote, two out of the three trustees responsible for decrypting the results provided their secret keys, but one, Moti Yung, a cryptographer and research scientist at Google, did not, according to the group’s public election page.In its apologetic memo,...