Quote from: ByronLegosi on March 14, 2013, 10:18 pmI'm off to bed but have a read about the foo-evoting system and some of the critiques. In much the way bitcoins use a network to verify their existence (simplified of course) you use the same idea to verify votes (or in this case you'd change the idea to verify keys) without anyone seeing the actual vote (or key).An implementation I wrote in Java about 7 years ago (I'm dangerously close to revealing my identity so I'm not comfortable going further) demonstrated that you could reliably confirm the security and anonymity of an entity (we'll use instead of 'vote' or 'key') with only 3 hosts.I think you're referring to private computation here. It's a great theoretical concept, but I've yet to see a practical implementation of it in any sphere e.g. your e-voting.Ideally you want what I refer to as a permeable system. A system where compromise is unproductive for the enemy, where you can show all the data the web server uses publicly, yet it does not help the enemy. I would like to see such a construction to replace something like Tormail, where the traffic analysis strategy loses its utility.I believe there was a city in the Fantasy series The Wheel of Time. This city was in fact a kind of maze, where the enemy was able to infiltrate without difficulty but instead of One Big Wall there was instead a thousand walled streets, literally a death trap, the perfect realization of Stalingrad. That's what you want for a private information system. A distributed open anonymous communication system. Myself, Bungee and kmfkewm and others have discussed it before at different times (it is the El Dorado of the Darknet), eventually coming to the conclusion that you need a far larger set of stakeholders than just ourselves to successfully achieve it. It is very possible, but like all grand projects it requires a great deal of consideration. A open system of this scale couldn't be created by a closed system, it would have to be open source and have a diverse and vibrant community behind it. Take a look at the design plan if this piques your interest, search this forum for "Speakeasy". I placed checksums for some links to the correct files.Note: This is not just a pine pipedream. In order for Cloud computing to scale up, it will absolutely have to engage with the concept of private computation. Otherwise it shall fail. I mean if I just have to hack into Amazon to access their cloud then no matter how hardened their servers are they'll gradually become more and more attractive to hackers. I find it hard to believe the CIA intends to use Amazon's cloud without some form of private computation? If they are, then that is just embarrassing, they should know better than that. Doesn't matter if it's a "private cloud", you want private computation because it scales up, anything else will be a catastrophe.