Damgård-Jurik Homomorphic Encryption With Secret Shares
Well, what a day … Boris Johnson has stepped down as the PM in the UK. For some in the UK, it is a happy moment.
And so, there will be a ballot to elect a new PM. But, just imagine if we could build an election system which truly preserved the privacy of voters, and which distributed the computation of the result over a distributed network? We could then generate cryptographic proofs that everything was working correctly, and that every vote was counted, and in a correct way. It would then integrate encryption, privacy-preserving methods, proofs of knowledge and resilience — and be an election which was fit for the 21st Century.
I appreciate that for the election of Boris’ successor, that this will not happen, but maybe in the future we could see these methods applied into general elections.
Homomorphic Encryption and Secret Shares
Over the next decade, two major areas of developments within cybersecurity will be the usage of homomorphic encryption, and Shamir secret sharing. With homomorphic encryption, we can encrypt values, and then operate on them with arithmetic functions (such as add, subtract and multiply), and with Shamir secret sharing, we can split secrets into shares, and then distributed them over networks. These approaches will take…
