Switzerland Protects its Vote with Quantum Cryptography
This is so silly I wasn’t going to even bother blogging about it. But the sheer number of news stories has made me change my mind.
Basically, the Swiss company ID Quantique convinced the Swiss government to use quantum cryptography to protect vote transmissions during their October 21 election. It was a great publicity stunt, and the news articles were filled with hyperbole: how the “unbreakable” encryption will ensure the integrity of the election, how this will protect the election against hacking, and so on.
Complete idiocy. There are many serious security threats to voting systems, especially paperless touch-screen voting systems, but they’re not centered around the transmission of votes from the voting site to the central tabulating office. The software in the voting machines themselves is a much bigger threat, one that quantum cryptography doesn’t solve in the least.
Moving data from point A to point B securely is one of the easiest security problems we have. Conventional encryption works great. PGP, SSL, SSH could all be used to solve this problem, as could pretty much any good VPN software package; there’s no need to use quantum crypto for this at all. Software security, OS security, network security, and user security are much harder security problems; and quantum crypto doesn’t even begin to address them.
So, congratulations to ID Quantique for a nice publicity stunt. But did they actually increase the security of the Swiss election? Doubtful.
Anonymous • October 29, 2007 6:25 AM
At least they still have a real democracy, with proportional representation (instead of the winner takes it all system which leaves up to 49.99% of the voters without representation)) and more than two parties (which, despite having different names, accept bribes from the same “sponsors” and therefor do not differ in their actual policies).