Democracy Enhancing Technologies: Toward deployable and incoercible E2E elections

End-to-end verifiable election systems (E2E systems) provide a provably correct tally while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's ballot, even if the voter is complicit in demonstrating how they voted. Providing voter incoercibility is one of the main challenges of designing E2E systems, particularly in the case of internet voting. A second challenge is building deployable, human-voteable E2E systems that conform to election laws and conventions. This dissertation examines deployability, coercion-resistance, and their intersection in election systems. In the course of this study, we introduce three new election systems, (Scantegrity, Eperio, and Selections), report on two real-world elections using E2E systems (Punchscan and Scantegrity), and study incoercibility issues in one deployed system (Punchscan). In addition, we propose and study new practical primitives for random beacons, secret printing, and panic passwords. These are tools that can be used in an election to, respectively, generate publicly verifiable random numbers, distribute the printing of secrets between non-colluding printers, and to covertly signal duress during authentication. While developed to solve specific problems in deployable and incoercible E2E systems, these techniques may be of independent interest

Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International JointConference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first in-personconference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event forthe community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-IDconference resulted from merging EVOTE and Vote-ID, and 18 years have now elapsed sincethe first EVOTE conference in Austria.Since that conference in 2004, over 1500 experts have attended the venue, including scholars,practitioners, authorities, electoral managers, vendors, and PhD students. E-Vote-ID collectsthe most relevant debates on the development of electronic voting, from aspects relating tosecurity and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, alsoincluding legal, social, or political aspects, amongst others, turning out to be an importantglobal referent on these issues

Resilience-Building Technologies: State of Knowledge -- ReSIST NoE Deliverable D12

This document is the first product of work package WP2, "Resilience-building and -scaling technologies", in the programme of jointly executed research (JER) of the ReSIST Network of Excellenc

Cryptographic techniques for privacy and access control in cloud-based applications

Digitization is one of the key challenges for today’s industries and society. It affects more and more business areas and also user data and, in particular, sensitive information. Due to its sensitivity, it is important to treat personal information as secure and private as possible yet enabling cloud-based software to use that information when requested by the user. In this thesis, we focus on the privacy-preserving outsourcing and sharing of data, the querying of outsourced protected data, and the usage of personal information as an access control mechanism for rating platforms, which should be protected from coercion attacks. In those three categories, we present cryptographic techniques and protocols that push the state of the art. In particular, we first present multi-client oblivious RAM (ORAM), which augments standard ORAM with selective data sharing through access control, confidentiality, and integrity. Second, we investigate on recent work in frequency-hiding order-preserving encryption and show that the state of the art misses rigorous treatment, allowing for simple attacks against the security of the existing scheme. As a remedy, we show how to fix the security definition and that the existing scheme, slightly adapted, fulfills it. Finally, we design and develop a coercion-resistant rating platform. Coercion-resistance has been dealt with mainly in the context of electronic voting yet also affects other areas of digital life such as rating platforms.Die Digitalisierung ist eine der größten Herausforderungen für Industrie und Gesellschaft. Neben vielen Geschäftsbereichen betrifft diese auch, insbesondere sensible, Nutzerdaten. Daher sollten persönliche Informationen so gut wie möglich gesichert werden. Zugleich brauchen Cloud-basierte Software-Anwendungen, die der Nutzer verwenden möchte, Zugang zu diesen Daten. Diese Dissertation fokussiert sich auf das sichere Auslagern und Teilen von Daten unter Wahrung der Privatsphäre, auf das Abfragen von geschützten, ausgelagerten Daten und auf die Nutzung persönlicher Informationen als Zugangsberechtigung für erpressungsresistente Bewertungsplattformen. Zu diesen drei Themen präsentieren wir kryptographische Techniken und Protokolle, die den Stand der Technik voran treiben. Der erste Teil stellt Multi-Client Oblivious RAM (ORAM) vor, das ORAM durch die Möglichkeit, Daten unter Wahrung von Vertraulichkeit und Integrität mit anderen Nutzern zu teilen, erweitert. Der zweite Teil befasst sich mit Freuquency-hiding Order-preserving Encryption. Wir zeigen, dass dem Stand der Technik eine formale Betrachtung fehlt, was zu Angriffen führt. Um Abhilfe zu schaffen, verbessern wir die Sicherheitsdefinition und beweisen, dass das existierende Verschlüsselungsschema diese durch minimale Änderung erfüllt. Abschließend entwickeln wir ein erpressungsresistentes Bewertungsportal. Erpressungsresistenz wurde bisher hauptsächlich im Kontext von elektronischen Wahlen betrachtet

The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism

This book examines the highly ambivalent implications and effects of anti-elitism. It draws on this theme as a cross-cutting entry point to provide transdisciplinary analysis of current conjunctures and their contradictions, drawing on examples from popular culture and media, politics, fashion, labour and spatial arrangements. Using the toolboxes of media and discourse analysis, hegemony theory, ethnography, critical social psychology and cultural studies more broadly, the book surveys and theorizes the forms, the implications and the ambiguities and limits of anti-elitist formations in different parts of the world. Anti-elitist sentiments colour the contemporary political conjuncture as much as they shape pop cultural and media trends. Populists, right-wing authoritarian ones and others, direct their anger at cultural, political and, sometimes, economic elites while supporting other elites and creating new ones. At the same time, "elitist" knowledge and expertise, decision-making power and taste regimes are being questioned in societal transformations that are discussed much more positively under headlines such as participation or democratization. The book brings together a group of international, interdisciplinary case studies in order to better understand the ways in which the battle cry "against the elites" shapes current conjunctures and possible future politics, focusing on themes such as nationalist political discourse in India, Austria, the UK and Hungary, labour struggles and anti-oligarchy rhetoric in Russia, tax-avoiding elites and fiscal imaginaries, working-class agency, Melania Trump as a celebrity narrative in Slovenia, aesthetic codes of the Alt-Right, football hooliganism in Germany, "hipster hate" in German political discourse or the politics of expertise and anti-elite iconography in high fashion internationally. The book is intended for undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers

Fighting for the mantle of science : the epistemological foundations of neoliberalism, 1931-1951

Cette thèse examine la genèse intellectuelle du néolibéralisme au prisme de son épistémologie. Elle interroge le développement de ses arguments concernant la production et la diffusion de la connaissance, guidée par l’hypothèse que la formulation d’une position épistémologique commune a été cruciale pour la consolidation de son programme idéologique. Je propose que le néolibéralisme, en provoquant une rupture avec le libéralisme classique, a opéré un recodage des principes libéraux à l’intérieur d’un cadre épistémologique basé sur le conventionnalisme, à l’aide de prémisses tirées des sciences naturelles, de la théorie économique, et de la philosophie des sciences. Afin d’obtenir un panorama contextuel de son émergence, cette thèse fournit une reconstruction des débats intellectuels des années 1930 en Angleterre sur deux plans principaux : le débat sur la planification de la science, et celui sur la planification de l’économie. Dans un climat propice aux idées planistes, perçues comme davantage rationnelles et scientifiques, les néolibéraux précoces s’attelèrent à montrer la portée limitée de la science positive pour orienter les décisions politiques. La montée du totalitarisme contribua à donner à leur discours une urgence singulière, puisqu’il expliquait le recours au collectivisme étatique par la prégnance d’opinions scientifiques erronées. Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la formation d’un réseau néolibéral déclencha une fertilisation croisée entre ces différents penseurs, dont l’agenda commun avait été défini au moment du Colloque Walter-Lippmann en 1938. En développant leurs intuitions sur le fonctionnement interne de la science et de l’économie comme modèles de coopération libre, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Louis Rougier, Walter Lippmann, et Karl Popper, élaborèrent une théorie sociale cohérente, qui supportaient les idéaux libéraux sur de nouvelles bases épistémologiques. Pour eux, le désir de mener une politique « scientifique » relevait d’un aveuglement méthodologique issu d’une mécompréhension de la nature de la connaissance et du travail scientifique, ainsi que d’une conception disproportionnée de leur potentiel. En reliant de manière analogique la liberté scientifique, avec celle garantie par le marché ou la règle de droit, la position de la pensée et de la connaissance dans la société est devenue leur préoccupation principale. Ce recodage met en lumière la forme particulière de l’idéologie néolibérale : la compétition et les marchés sont redéfinis comme procédures de découverte, les traditions sont perçues comme des réservoirs de connaissance tacite, et les institutions sont conçues comme les préconditions et les résultats d’ordres spontanés. L’institutionnalisation de ce collectif de pensée fragmentaire lors de la fondation de la Société du Mont-Pèlerin en 1947 révéla à la fois l’ambition idéologique de ce projet et ses limites immédiates.This dissertation examines the intellectual genesis of neoliberalism through the prism of its epistemology. It interrogates the development of its arguments regarding the production and diffusion of knowledge, guided by the hypothesis that formulating a common epistemological stance was crucial for the consolidation of its ideological program. I propose that early neoliberalism, by provoking a rupture with classical liberalism, recoded liberal principles into an epistemological framework based on conventionalism, with premises drawn from the natural sciences, economic theory, and the philosophy of science. To achieve a contextual picture of its emergence, the dissertation provides a reconstruction of the intellectual debates of the 1930s in England on two major fronts: the debate on planning in science, and the debate on planning in the economy. Amidst a general enthusiasm for planning ideas perceived as being more rational and scientific, early neoliberals warned of the limited value of positive science in guiding policy decisions. The rise of totalitarianism gave their discourse a dramatic urgency as it explicitly linked faulty scientific views with the rise of state collectivism. During the Second World War, the formation of a neoliberal network triggered a cross-fertilization between these early neoliberal thinkers, whose common agenda had been defined at the Walter-Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. Drawing from their intuitions about the inner workings of science and the economy held as models of free cooperation, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Louis Rougier, Walter Lippmann, and Karl Popper, cemented a coherent social theory which vindicated liberal ideals on new epistemological grounds. To them, the aspiration towards ‘scientific’ politics denoted a methodological delusion built on a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge and of scientific work, as well as on a hubristic conception of their potential. By linking analogically the freedom experienced by the scientist, to the one guaranteed by the market or by the rule of law, the position of thought and knowledge in society became their core concern. Paying attention to this recoding process sheds light on the peculiar shape of neoliberal ideology: competition and markets were redefined as discovery procedures, traditions were seen as receptacles of tacit knowledge, and institutions were conceived as the preconditions and results of dynamic evolutionary orders. The institutionalization of this fragmentary thought collective at the foundation of the Mont-Pèlerin Society in 1947 revealed both the novelty of this project and its immediate limits, in particular the tensions between its scientific ambition and its ideological projection

Library buildings around the world

"Library Buildings around the World" is a survey based on researches of several years. The objective was to gather library buildings on an international level starting with 1990

Provable and Practical Security for Database Outsourcing

In this work, we provide formal notions for different privacy goals of data outsourcing and establish their relations. Furthermore, as a main contribution, we provide a meaningful security notion for database outsourcing and a practical scheme fulfilling this notion as well as implementations that demonstrate the viability. We prove the security of our scheme in a formal model and provide extensions an optimisations for performance as well as for security