Aaron Feickert - Aura: Using Privacy-Respecting Technology to Build Secure Voting

Electronic voting is hard. Really hard! Existing approaches to this problem make many tradeoffs, like leaking voter information or trusting voting authorities not to cheat. What we want is a way to conduct a vote electronically that respects voter privacy, allows anyone to verify the results are correct, and minimizes trust in voting and tallying authorities.

This talk will introduce Aura, a voting protocol that meets these goals. Aura uses several privacy-respecting techniques (including some from private transaction protocols!) to do this. We’ll provide a high-level overview of how it works and why it’s useful.

This talk should be accessible to everyone, and no particular technical background is assumed.