Peter Ryan, Professor of Information Security at the University of Luxembourg
| Peter Ryan |
Author Biography Since February of 2009, Peter Ryan has been Professor of Information Security at the University of Luxembourg. He has over 20 years of experience in information assurance and formal verification. He pioneered the application of process algebras to the modelling and analysis of secure systems and he initiated and led the project that developed the CSP and model-checking approach to the analysis of security protocols. He has published extensively on cryptography, cryptographic protocols, mathematical models of computer security and, most recently, high assurance voting systems. He is the creator of Prêt à Voter, Pretty Good Democracy (with Vanessa Teague) and OpenVote (with Feng Hoa) verifiable voting schemes. He holds a PhD in mathematical physics from the University of London. |
| Abstract Chaum's code voting approach to internet voting sidesteps many of the vulnerabilities of the internet but it does not provide any end-to-end verification of votes: the Vote Server must be trusted to register and count the vote correctly. Pretty Good Democracy enhances code voting by providing vote verifiability. The key idea is to threshold distribute knowledge of the vote and acknowledgement codes amongst a set of trustees. Now, when the voter gets the correct acknowledgement code back from the server, she has a far higher level of assurance that his vote has been correctly registered. A Prêt a Voter style back end then ensures that registered votes will be correctly tabulated in an anonymous fashion. |