Shielded Voting Using Threshold Encryption | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] was supposed to have this talk because he's actually done all the work but unfortunately what he got covered so I had to jump in I hope I can do him Justice um I want to start very abstract to make it a little bit fun uh what does shutter do it basically allows users to safely reveal private information that they have to some sort of system meaning that an attacker who gets hold of that information can't abuse it or can't use it for anything malicious so basically we want to go from a world like this where we have monsters that look at in monsters in the forest but look at your private information and do bad stuff with it to something like this like a more Heavenly View everything is safe and nice how do we do that we use flashlight encryption which allows uh basically social encryption we have a set of notes that provides an encryption key and then a user can now encrypt their message using that that key and then it's protected from everyone that no one can abuse the data and only when it's safe to reveal that information then this network of nodes will produce the decryption key um and then everyone can see the message um what is safe of course depends highly on on the application and here we want to talk about voting and governance and this sort of stuff basically what we want to do here is we want to encrypt votes until the voting period is over so that voters don't see how others how other people voted until yeah until they can't vote anymore it's very interesting because in Dallas this is at the moment not the case in endow voting usually you see all the other votes and they can influence your decision whereas in traditional votes like if you vote for a parliament or in an election this is not the case and there you only start counting when no one is allowed to submit votes anymore this is very good reasons because otherwise you get some sort of a lot of undesirable behaviors for example just three here voter apathy if you see that um right in the beginning a big voter submitted lots of votes for candidate a then maybe lots of people small people with only a small voting power that would want to vote and be on candidate B might not do this because basically um it's probably already over um we've lost but if they would not have had this information everyone would have voted then they might have actually won against this one big player and this is actually a big problem right now in Dallas in our voting another example that we might want to prevent is strategic voting so if you for example if you have a vote where two candidate that's convinced and your primary candidate that you want to win already has like lots of vote then you votes then you might want to vote on your secondary candidate which is not what the voting mechanism is intended to encourage so that would we also prevent if you can't see what voters do and last example buying of votes it gets much harder if you don't know how many votes you have to buy in order to win out of scope is privacy because after though it's over everything will be public yeah we're very um proud to collaborate on this with snapshot if you don't know snapshot is this big Dow voting platform basically all dollars use it and they're pretty cool and since we are starting today basically they support now shutter as a private voting system so that was about to set up in votes they can use a shutter to make their votes more secure their elections more secure how does it work the life cycle of a vote the shutter system starts by generating a long-lived eon key it does that once and then if a user wants to vote on a proposal they use that yonki and the idea of the proposal and derive an encryption key from these two pieces of data for this no communication is required it can be done purely locally once the proposal is finished um basically then yeah the user sent encrypt their votes send it to snapshot and once the proposal is finished the snapshot will send a decryption request to the shutter system shutter will then generate the decryption key um because then it is safe to reveal uh the the votes because no one can vote anymore and using that decryption key shutter snapshot can decrypt and count everything um some screenshots here oh how it would look like basically if you set up a vote you can select shutter it's purely optional if you do that during voting you see nothing basically you only see the number of votes who who already a number of people who submitted votes already you don't see how many votes Ellis got you don't see how many votes Bob got and only in the end when no one can vote anymore you will see that in this example Alice has won and Bob didn't get any votes yeah and as I said this is starting starting from today it's live you can try it out um we do have some other things at uh at Charter we do using this mechanism I hinted it but it's quite General and it's mostly about muva related and since I have one and a half minutes left I want to talk briefly about this basically we use this threshold encryption mechanism to prevent front running and malicious Mev our main focus here is is rollaps so we our product is called rolling shutter that can integrate into roll Labs as a kind of a plugin but we're also looking at Beacon chain at once that we have for example a beacon chain proposal but on the research side um yeah that's basically it um please try it out it's uh it's still of course early there might be bugs but it should work it's live um you can scan this QR code if you want to try it follow us on Twitter project shutter also snapshot Labs or collaborators and ulupi who's the guy who is supposed to be here and my name is another Yannick um yeah and of course this is all part of brain board so the company that does a shutter is called rainbow and we have lots of other projects including Beamer raid and Trust lines how damp lots of people are people here yeah cool thank you we still have time so if you have any questions remember that lighting talks are like seven minutes and we have three minutes for questions so we have our volunteers there you go please one second because for the streaming thank you Nicole is it is it obligatory to uh to have the the results um uh shown at the end of the voting with with snapshot uh like on a per voter basis or do you just show the aggregate results so in this mechanism uh to be honest I don't really know what what Snapchat shows but in principle all votes will be public afterwards because the encrypted worlds are public and the decryption will be public so you can find out who voted for what that's part of what why I said privacy is not in in scope of this for this you would need other mechanisms if you want that one short question more yeah just follow up are there plans to introduce privacy in into the setup um not business I think threshold encryption basically ends there I don't think it's it's possible for this you need some heavier cryptography thank you very cool all right big round of applause for Yannick thank you so much thank you