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Researchers and industry are investigating the possibilities of blockchain-based voting

22 DECEMBER 2022

Researchers and industry are investigating the possibilities of blockchain-based voting

Aarhus University and the Alexandra Institute have been granted DKK 1.8 million by Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC) to investigate safe software and protocols for voting and blockchain governance. The Concordium Blockchain is the industry partner in this project.

There is constant interest for internet voting by election commissions around the world. At the same time, there is a need for such internet voting for blockchain governance. However, building such voting systems is hard: the design of cryptographic protocols and their implementation are error prone. Switzerland, which is leading in internet voting, now mandates very high standards for such protocols: it requires cryptographic proofs of security.

Only a very select group of blockchain projects already develops protocols in such a rigorous way. One of them, Concordium, has already deployed such secure cryptographic protocols. They were designed at COBRA, the Concordium Blockchain Research Center at Aarhus University. Thus, the project aims to build on this experience and advance the state of the art in high assurance cryptographic software, especially for internet voting systems and blockchain governance.

DIREC, a collaboration between the computer science departments of eight Danish universities and the Alexandra Institute, has just granted the group DKK 1.8 million for the project: Verified Voting Protocols and Blockchains. The Concordium Blockchain is the industry partner in this project.

Bas Spitters, Associate Professor at Aarhus University and lead of the Concordium Blockchain Research Center at Aarhus University (CoBRA), is leading the project. He is internationally recognized for his research in the verification of blockchain technologies and sees great potential for the project:

“All electronic voting protocols use some kind of bulletin board. Blockchains are secure bulletin boards. They are already used in minor elections to ensure that voters can check that their votes have been registered correctly. In this project, we will explore whether it can also be used in larger elections. In particular, we aim to verify that the protocols used to verify the votes are private and secure.”

Kåre Kjelstrøm, CTO at Concordium, says:
“There are of course many advantages in an online election, however distrust and a lack of regulation-ready and secure solutions have prevented most countries from moving forward. From Concordium, a science-based decentralized blockchain with the identity at the protocol level, we are eager to participate and solve the potential problems in building online elections on our chain. Concordium plans to design a voting scheme to be used for decentralized governance of the blockchain. The voting scheme will allow members of the community to vote on proposed features and to elect members of the Governance Committee.”

Gert Læssøe Mikkelsen, Head of Security Lab, Alexandra Institute says: 
“This project provides a good opportunity for testing novel technologies in solutions for critical digital infrastructure where very high security is required. We will test and participate in the implementation of the solutions developed in the project, and we want to let more industries benefit from the experiences of working with blockchain, digital identity and high security, e.g., public utilities and the finance sector”.

Read more about the project

Finally, the project will collaborate with another DIREC project called Trust Through Software Independence and Program Verification lead by Carsten Schürmann from ITU on the further development of tools for ensuring the quality of voting protocols and their implementation.

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News

Merry Christmas from DIREC

22 DECEMBER 2022

Merry Christmas from DIREC

Christmas is coming after an extraordinary and eventful year. The digital agenda is busy and, in DIREC we have been fully engaged with placing Denmark at the forefront of digital research and innovation. We would like to thank you for a great year with many fruitful collaborations and projects.

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News

Intelligent robots can save billions by preventing production breakdowns

20 DECEMBER 2022

Intelligent robots can save billions by preventing production breakdowns

Artificial intelligence can prevent costly production breakdowns and predict exactly when a robotic system requires service and maintenance. The technology is expected to save billions in lost production and general service costs for industrial companies.

Each year, global companies lose billions in operational disruptions and production stoppages as a result of routine maintenance of robotic systems.

Read the post in Danish

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News

A research project on internet elections in Greenland must provide a better basis for decision

7 December 2022

A research project on internet elections in Greenland must provide a better basis for decision

A group of researchers from the IT University will – in collaboration with the Greenlandic authorities – investigate how an internet election will affect the voters’ confidence in the electoral process. DIREC has granted the group 1.8 million DKK for the project.

In a time where we can deal with many things online, it may seem strange that voters in the vast majority of the world’s democracies still have to cast their votes by physically attending a polling station. The reason for this is that it is extremely difficult to ensure that everything takes place according to the democratic regulations when an election is held online. For example, it is difficult to maintain the secrecy of the vote, just as there is a fear of giving hackers an increased opportunity of altering the votes.

Having said that, there are of a lot of arguments in favour of internet elections, not least in Greenland, where the enormous distances, for example, can make it difficult to reach everyone with physical ballots in time. And this is exactly one of the reasons why a change in the law in 2020 paved the way for the Greenlandic government to give Greenlanders the opportunity to cast their vote online in the future. Greenland can thus become one of the few places in the world where the critized internet voting systems can be put into use.

A group of researchers from the IT University will now, in collaboration with the Greenlandic authorities, investigate how an internet election will affect the voters’ confidence in the electoral process. DIREC, which is partially financed by the Innovation Fund, has granted the group DKK 1.8 million for the project: Trust through Software Independence and Program Verification, which aims to investigate whether the technical software verifications in the internet election systems will increase trust among the voters.

– My goal is to give the Greenlandic decision-makers good conditions for deciding which system they should use to hold online elections. From a research point of view, the project can also be valuable. Technologically speaking, we are moving into unknown territory and depending on our results, you can easily imagine that the many, many countries that can see the benefits of an election will be able to use our results as well. And finally, Greenland – with its limited population and great distances – is an optimal place to start from, says professor at the IT University, Carsten Schürmann, who is Principal Investigator on the project.

Read more about the project.

Read more about the project Verified Voting Protocols and Blockchains. 

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Bridge project

Verified Voting Protocols and Blockchains

DIREC project

Verified Voting protocols and blockchains

Summary

There is constant interest for Internet Voting by election commissions around the world. At the same time, there is a need for online voting in blockchain governance. However, building an internet voting system is not easy: The design of new cryptographic protocols is error-prone, and public trust in the elected body is easily threatened.

Together with an industrial partner, this project aims to improve the security and quality of the internet voting system and influence regulation on minimum quality requirements for blockchains. 

Project period: 2023-2025
Budget: DKK 7,5 million

Our aim is to bring the security proofs about protocols much closer to their implementation.

Here are four considerations that explain the unmet needs of this project.

  1. Voting protocols, both in form of Blockchain Governance Protocols and Internet Voting Protocols have become increasingly popular and will be more widely deployed, as a result of an ongoing digitalization effort of democratic processes and also driven by the current pandemic.
  2. Elections are based on trust, which means that election systems ideally should be based on algorithms and data structures that are already trusted. Blockchains provide such a technology. They provide a trusted bulletin board, which can be used as part of voting.
  3. Voting crucially depends on establishing the identity of the voter to avoid fraud and to establish eligibility verifiability.
  4. Any implementation created by a programmer, be it a Blockchain Governance Protocol or an Internet Voting Protocol can have bugs that quickly erode public confidence.

This project aims to shed more light on the overall research question, how to design high assurance blockchain governance software, and can such protocols scale to Internet Voting Protocols.

(RO) To advance the state of the art of high assurance cryptographic software, especially for blockchain governance protocols and voting protocols.

(WP1) To achieve (RO), we start by working towards a high assurance implementation of a blockchain governance protocol (e.g. the one used by Concordium) and an existing blockchain voting protocol, such as the Open Vote Network, or Election Guard. If there is sufficient progress in the design of a software-independent protocol we will retarget our research to such a protocol. This will use existing software projects developed at AU: SSProve, ConCert and various libraries for high assurance cryptographic primitives. AU will take the lead for this WP.

(WP2) The Concordium blockchain provides a secure and private way to put credentials, such as passport information, on the internet. In this project we aim to integrate this with legacy ID infrastructure, such as MitID. We will investigate how to reuse such blockchain based identities for internet voting. We aim to address (4) above in this way. Concordium will take the lead for this WP.

(WP3) Implementation of the cryptographic protocol. Based on the results from (WP1), we propose to develop an open-source library that makes our high assurance blockchain voting technology available for use in third-party products. We envision to release a prototype similar to Election Guard (which is provided by Microsoft), but with a blockchain providing the ID infrastructure, as well as functioning as a public bulletin board. ALX will take the lead for this WP.

Scientific value
Internet voting provides a unique collection of challenges, such as, for example, vote privacy, software quality, receipt freeness, coercion resistance, and dispute resolution. Subsets of them can be solved separately, here we aim to guarantee vote privacy and software quality by the means of a privacy-preserving and accountable blockchain and formally verify substantial parts of the resulting voting protocol.

Capacity building
The proposed project pursues capacity building by training a PhD student. The Alexandra Institute will build capacity in rust, smart contracts and high assurance cryptographic software.

Business value
The project is highly interesting to and relevant for the industry. There are two reasons why it is interesting for Concordium. On the one hand, voting is an excellent application demonstrating the vision of the blockchain and, on the other hand, Concordium will as part of the project implement a voting scheme to be used for decentralized governance of the blockchain. More precisely, the Concordium blockchain is designed to support applications where users can act privately while maintaining accountability and meeting regulatory requirements.

Furthermore, it is an explicit goal of Concordium to support formally verified smart contracts. Obviously, all these goals fit nicely with the proposed project, and it will be important for Concordium to demonstrate that the blockchain actually supports the secure voting schemes developed in the project. With respect to governance, Concordium has a need to develop a strong voting scheme allowing members of our community to vote on proposed features and to elect members of the Governance Committee. The project is of great interest to the Alexandra Institute to apply and improve in-house capacity for implementing cryptographic algorithms. The involvement of Alexandra will guarantee that the theoretical findings of the proposed project will we translated into usable real world products.

Societal value
Internet voting was stalled for three years in Switzerland due to insecure protocols and implementations. We aim to develop technology to improve the security (audits) of such protocols and implementations. Around 5 billion dollars were lost since 2018 due to insecure blockchain implementations, often effecting retail investors. Our project aims to improve the state of the art of cryptographic software, and thus influence regulation on minimal quality requirements for blockchains, similar to existing Swiss regulation for e-voting.

News / coverage

Participants

Project Manager

Bas Spitters

Associate Professor

Aarhus University
Department of Computer Science

E: spitters@cs.au.dk

Gert Læssøe Mikkelsen

Head of Security Lab

The Alexandra Institute

Nibras Stiebar-Bang

Chief Technology Officer

Concordium ApS

Bernardo David

Associate Professor

IT University of Copenhagen

Diego Aranha

Associate Professor

Aarhus University
Department of Computer Science

Lasse Letager Hansen

PhD Student

Aarhus University
Department of Computer Science

Eske Hoy Nielsen

PhD Student

Aarhus University
Department of Computer Science

Partners

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Previous events

ARCO Fall 2023

ARCO Fall 2023

The second ARCO workshop in 2023 will take place at the University of Southern Denmark, Campus Odense, on November 24.

ARCO (Algorithmic Research: Cooperation around Øresund) is a network for exchange of research within algorithms and to promote the general interest in this research area within the Øresund Region.

For full programme see ARCO Fall 2023.

The organizers of this workshop are Joan Boyar, Kevin Schewior, Kim Skak Larsen, and Lene Monrad Favrholdt.

ARCO is sponsored by DIREC. 

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High school teachers with a passion for information technology must scale up young people’s digital skills

24 november 2022

High school teachers with a passion for technology must help scale up young people’s digital skills

Universities will upskill Danish high school teachers with the latest IT knowledge and inspiration for teaching. Dedicated teachers are important inspiration for young people when choosing their course of study.

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NordiCrypt Fall 2023

Nordicrypt fall 2023

Join the third NordiCrypt meetup in Copenhagen.

NordiCrypt is a group for “IACR-style” cryptographers created by researchers from DTU, ITU and AU to promote joint networking activities for researchers in Denmark and the rest of Northern Europe. NordiCrypt is an initiative born in the context of DIREC.

NordiCrypt will organize one-day meetups in Denmark approximately every 3-6 months. The meetups are open to researchers from neighbouring fields, as well as neighbouring countries.

If you wish to give a talk, please email beda(at)itu[dot]dk. Talks by junior researchers in all fields of cryptology are highly encouraged!

More info

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Can AI help a health system under pressure?

27 OCTOBER 2022

Can AI help a health system under pressure?

In Denmark we have a shortage of medical specialists and nurses. In 2025, according to the Danish Nurses’ Organization, there will be a shortage of at least 6,000 nurses, and the lack of medical specialists is also a huge problem for a hospital sector under a historically high pressure.

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Digital Tech Summit: Generative AI – Hype or Transformation?

DIGITAL Tech summit 2023

Generative AI – Hype or Transformation?

Generative AI has been making waves in recent years, captivating our imagination with its potential to transform industries and reshape our creative processes. But is it all just hype, or are we witnessing a genuine transformation?


Generative AI has found applications in fields as diverse as art, healthcare, finance, and education. To some, it represents a revolutionary leap forward, promising to unlock unprecedented levels of creativity and productivity. To others, it raises ethical concerns and the specter of job displacement. One thing is certain – Generative AI is here to stay and it demands our attention and thoughtful consideration.



At this year’s Digital Tech Summit we have invited a strong panel to discuss the potentials and limitations of generative AI.


Meet: