In 2006, the Chancellor proposed to invade an enemy planet, but his motion was anonymously vetoed. Three years on, he still cannot find out who did it.

This time, the Chancellor is seeking re-election in the Galactic Senate. Some delegates don’t want to vote for him, but worry about his revenge. How to arrange an election such that the voter’s privacy will be best protected?

The environment is extremely adverse. Surveillance is everywhere. Anything you say will be recorded and traceable to you. All communication is essentially public. In addition, you have no one to trust but yourself.

It may seem mind-boggling that this problem is solvable in the first place. With cryptography, anything is possible. In a forthcoming paper to be published by IET Information Security, we (joint work with Peter Ryan and Piotr Zielinski) described a decentralized voting protocol called “Open Vote Network”.

In the Open Vote Network protocol, all communication data is open, and publicly verifiable. The protocol provides the maximum protection of the voter’s privacy; only a full collusion can break the privacy. In addition, the protocol is exceptionally efficient. It compares favorably to past solutions in terms of the round efficiency, computation load and bandwidth usage, and has been close to the best possible in each of these aspects.

With the same security properties, it seems unlikely to have a decentralized voting scheme that is significantly more efficient than ours. However, in cryptography, nothing is ever optimal, so we keep this question open.

A preprint of the paper is available here, and the slides here.