600 research outputs found
Public Evidence from Secret Ballots
Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique,
challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are
high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the
results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they
have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to
be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and
pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area
spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable
security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts:
convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to
convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person
voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this
tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1
Quantum protocols for anonymous voting and surveying
We describe quantum protocols for voting and surveying. A key feature of our
schemes is the use of entangled states to ensure that the votes are anonymous
and to allow the votes to be tallied. The entanglement is distributed over
separated sites; the physical inaccessibility of any one site is sufficient to
guarantee the anonymity of the votes. The security of these protocols with
respect to various kinds of attack is discussed. We also discuss classical
schemes and show that our quantum voting protocol represents a N-fold reduction
in computational complexity, where N is the number of voters.Comment: 8 pages. V2 includes the modifications made for the published versio
Hashing Based Software Watermarking for Source Code Files
Software is developed and delivered to clients as a routine part of software engineering life cycle . Software is quite an expensive entity. However various attacks are possible on software to make its illegal use. Different solutions are there to prevent piracy. Software watermarking embeds a watermark in the source code so that it is undetectable yet it proves the ownership of the developer. The technique has been tested for C++ source code files, however, it can be applicable on any other language. The proposed techniques scans the code for all possible constants, forms a hash sequence using MD5 algorithm that calculates the watermark and stores in Date & Watermark Value Repository (DWVR)
Privacy-preserving smart metering revisited
Privacy-preserving billing protocols are useful in settings where a meter measures user consumption of some service, such as smart metering of utility consumption, pay-as-you-drive insurance and electronic toll collection. In such settings, service providers apply fine-grained tariff policies that require meters to provide a detailed account of user consumption. The protocols allow the user to pay to the service provider without revealing the user’s consumption measurements. Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a general model where a meter can output meter readings to multiple users, and where a user receives meter readings from multiple meters. Unlike previous schemes, our model accommodates a wider variety of smart metering applications. Second, we describe a protocol based on polynomial commitments that improves the efficiency of previous protocols for tariff policies that employ splines to compute the price due
Security by Spatial Reference:Using Relative Positioning to Authenticate Devices for Spontaneous Interaction
Spontaneous interaction is a desirable characteristic associated with mobile and ubiquitous computing. The aim is to enable users to connect their personal devices with devices encountered in their environment in order to take advantage of interaction opportunities in accordance with their situation. However, it is difficult to secure spontaneous interaction as this requires authentication of the encountered device, in the absence of any prior knowledge of the device. In this paper we present a method for establishing and securing spontaneous interactions on the basis of emphspatial references that capture the spatial relationship of the involved devices. Spatial references are obtained by accurate sensing of relative device positions, presented to the user for initiation of interactions, and used in a peer authentication protocol that exploits a novel mechanism for message transfer over ultrasound to ensures spatial authenticity of the sender
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