Cryptocurrency

a16z releases nameless voting system for Ethereum

May 26, 2023
2 minutes read

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Enterprise capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, also called “a16z,” has launched a Solidity library that can be utilized for nameless voting on Ethereum. Referred to as “Cicada,” the library prevents a person voter’s alternative from being recognized earlier than polling ends. When mixed with zero-knowledge (ZK) group membership methods like Semaphore, it could additionally make the identification of the voter completely unknowable, in line with a Might 24 weblog put up from a16z engineer Michael Zhu.

Cicada depends on time-lock puzzles, a kind of cryptography that enables customers to encrypt secret values that may solely be decrypted after a particular time period has handed, Zhu said.

These puzzles have been round since 1996. However earlier than 2019, they’d have required customers to disclose their secret values as soon as the time interval had handed. In voting methods, this might have precipitated issues with customers submitting votes after which going offline, stopping all of the votes from being countable.

In 2019, the idea of “homomorphic” time-lock puzzles was proposed by cryptographers Malavolta and Thyagarajan. This allowed the puzzles to be added collectively to provide a remaining puzzle that was a lot simpler to unravel than the sum of the person puzzles. The answer to the ultimate puzzle reveals solely the sum of the person values, with out revealing the person values making up this sum.

In accordance with the a16z put up, Cicada makes use of these homomorphic puzzles, permitting votes to be counted even when customers go offline.

When trying to switch Malavolta and Thyagarajan’s system to the blockchain, a16z researchers bumped into an impediment to creating a good voting system: every alternative wanted to be encoded as a boolean worth of “1” or “0.” This meant that an attacker may attempt to improve their voting energy by incorrectly encoding the vote, by encoding “100” as their worth, for instance.

To resolve this downside, Cicada requires voters to submit a zero-knowledge proof of poll validity together with every poll, the put up mentioned. The proof reveals that the vote was encoded appropriately, however with out revealing the contents of the vote.

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Cicada solely prevents votes from being recognized whereas the ballot is being performed. As soon as the “ballot has closed” or the time-lock interval has handed, any individual can decide the contents of a vote by brute-forcing the answer to the puzzle. Nonetheless, a16z steered that this downside could be solved by combining Cicada with zero-knowledge group membership methods like Semaphor, Semacaulk, or ZK state proofs. On this case, brute forcing the puzzle will solely reveal that the vote was forged by an eligible voter, however won’t reveal the credentials used to show the voter’s eligibility.

For example, Zhu supplied a hyperlink to a pattern contract produced utilizing Cicada that additionally depends on Semaphor to show voter eligibility.

Voting methods have lengthy been a element of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the governing our bodies that usually handle blockchain apps. However typically, DAOs use tokens to characterize votes, which signifies that a person consumer can have an outsized affect in the event that they maintain a lot of tokens. For instance, on Might 22, an attacker took management of Twister Money by creating additional votes for themselves by means of a malicious proposal, utilizing it to empty the entire governance contract’s funds. The attacker later supplied to provide again management to customers.

Waves Community Founder Sasha Ivanov has argued that DAOs should transfer to a extra democratic voting system if governance assaults like these are to be averted.