End to end security is not enough (Transcript of discussion)

Abstract

The idea behind this presentation originated when I was looking at e-voting. I was looking specifically at end-to-end systems, implementing them and considering what can go wrong. Now, there’s a bit of factionalization within e-voting research. A lot of people believe end-to-end verifiability is all you need for integrity. Then there’s a smaller faction who believe, “No, it’s more about reliability. It’s audit logs. It’s things like that.” I was giving some talks on this and one thing that came up a lot was the Estonian e-voting system. The Estonian system tends to get a lot of criticism in the literature because initially it wasn’t end-to-end verifiable, and there’s still debate about whether it is now, but on the other hand the Estonian system has some very nice things to do with logs and auditability in it, which I think maybe some other systems could learn from.