Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

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> No. This is incorrect. This is exactly the right attitude for most developers to have about cryptography, because on a subject as complex as cryptography most developers (including me!) are nowhere near smart enough to understand the ins and outs.

I hear that a lot, and it always reminds me of Jante Law[1]. Its a disservice to keep telling people that they are too stupid to understand something. Too ignorant, perhaps - that can be remedied - but everyone is not too stupid to understand crypto. It's simply another field, mostly mathematical, and goof-ups are easy to make and often very costly.

edit: I should also make another point. Cryptography is exactingly and excruciatingly hard to do at industrial strength. I am not recommending people go out and roll their own crypto for production systems. It's possible for the initiated to do right; it's possible to get initiated. The uninitiated almost certainly will goof. I'd like to further point out [2], which is a discussion and break on a homebrew crypto, for a taste of the difficulties and mathematical sophistication needed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law

[2]http://phrack.org/issues.html?issue=64&id=10#article

> Its a disservice to keep telling people that they are too stupid to understand something

That's not the point. Specialization - developing a deep understanding requires time and effort. As a developer choosing a way to store passwords securely is one task out of 1,000 I'm responsible for. So I acquire a general understanding of cryptography to make a decision - but that decision relies heavily on experts and consensus. The worst thing I can do as a developer is to go down the rabbit hole of cryptography and spend 10 hours researching an optimal password hashing scheme for my app. Sure, I've begun the journey of having a deep understanding of crypto - but I still have 999 things to do!

Which reminds me I need to get off HN and get some work done .....

> So I acquire a general understanding of cryptography to make a decision

But this is precisely what the cult priests don't want you to do. There are only two words you need to know: "use bcrypt". Any attempt to learn more is heresy.

Perhaps. But so what? As a developer the buck stops with you. If something goes wrong the boss (or client) will not be impressed by an excuse of "well I just did what someone on the internet said was best practice".

However I can see the problem with such a culture if your boss happens to be a bcrypt-tard and is closed off to discussion/learning.

Cryptography is exactingly and excruciatingly hard to do at industrial strength.

Related: Which is why I'm against any and all forms of electronic voting. I've done a fair share of crypto (as a user of crypto libraries) and I barely understand how it works. There's ZERO hope for the layperson to understand crypto-based voting systems.

One of the central tenets of American style voting is a public vote count. Using crypto puts the "public vote count" into the hands of a the high priesthood (a few adepts), which is a really bad idea.

Regardless of what you think of the kind of people who the government would contract to develop electronic voting machines, I don't think I'd call them "laypeople". Or are you saying that every individual voter needs to understand the inner workings of the system for it to be effective?

I would say that yes, every voter needs to be able to comprehend the system. Counting paper ballots is something anyone of normal intelligence can understand. Auditing them is something everyone can understand. Not so for cryptographic based systems, particularly proprietary systems.

The only electronic voting system I'd probably be OK with is one that is totally open-source, software and hardware. The implementation must be completely transparent.

Even then, fraud will happen. Always has, always will.

Or are you saying that every individual voter needs to understand the inner workings of the system for it to be effective?

Um, yea. That's what "public vote count" means.

As for the technical competence of our nation's election administrators, have you not been paying attention? I've met many many. Great at elections. Terrible at computers. Completely and utterly reliant on the vendors. Who've manifestly demonstrated their complete inability to code their way out of a wet paper bag, much less be entrusted with the foundations of our democracy.

But they don't need to understand the mathematical details of the cryptographic protocol (do they?), which seemed to be what you were implying. It seems to me the details could easily be abstracted away into a sequence of idiot-proof steps, but I don't know much of anything about public voting systems.

Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted - am I misinterpreting what specialist is saying? For another example, look at HTTPS - it secures your communication without any need for knowledge of how it's doing so, you just need to know that if you see the green lock icon you're "safe" (though I'm aware of all the usability issues, like how everyone just ignores warning messages when something goes wrong). Is there something fundamentally different about public voting systems in this regard?

I guess you're getting downvoted because that's exactly the point: Every layperson should be able to double check the vote in case of doubt. That includes the nitty gritty details, including the security of the cryptographic protocol. Paper-Ballots are simple. There's not much to understand: Make your cross, count the votes, add up, done. If in doubt, count again. You don't need to trust any expert on anything for that.

There are crypto-based voting systems that are very simple to understand, although not being entirely electronic: http://www.wombat-voting.com/

By all means, there are different shades of grey. It should not be all black or white.

Crypto-based voting systems are not designed to work for real-world elections. They work fine for contrived academic studies.

They all rely on one's vote being lost within a herd of votes. So if your ballot is one of a million, and the ballots are simple with a few races/issues, it's easy to have a secure one-way hash with collisions. (The collisions make it impossible to work backwards to infer how each person voted.)

Alas, real-world elections in the USA are administered at the precinct level. In my state, that's between 0 and 1000 registered voters.

Further, a general election (November) ballot will have dozens of issues and races.

So it's more than likely that any single ballot will be utterly unique. So with the voting systems I studied, it's trivial to infer how everyone voted.

I could imagine crypto-based voting systems working for certain applications. Like corporate shareholder meetings. Or maybe Australian and British style parliamentary elections. (Don't hold me to the last guess, I only have cursory knowledge of their election systems.)

Edit: I discussed these practical issues with one of the grad student authors of a crypto-based voting system. Being completely ignorant of real elections, he had NO IDEA what I was talking about. He denigrated my input; saying our elections should be easily tailored to accommodate crypto. (Good luck with that.)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that people setting out to solve a problem should probably make some token effort to first understand the problem. YMMV.

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