mspecter
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
323
Submissions
56
Member since
Jan 17
Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech
mikespecter.com
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 months ago
Also, I'm just the professor, the grad students on it are the real heroes: Akshaya Kumar [1] and Anna Raymaker [2].
Comment · 3 months ago
Interesting! Hadn't heard of it.
Comment · 3 months ago
In general, yes! We did some follow on work explaining how all of this works, depending on the provider: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0113.pdf
Comment · 3 months ago
Last author on the paper here (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00350). Happy to answer any questions!
Comment · 3 months ago
Good point. Most of this was written before the signal-custom-client thing happened, so it wasn't top of mind. We also considered "serious" systems, deployed en masse. Perhaps we should've included this as well.
Comment · 3 months ago
Oh, I didn't realize it'd made it to Schneier's blog, thanks for letting me know!
A goal of the work was to try to explain to a new audience (specifically nontechnical legal folks) the ongoing challenges with Going Dark. Hopefully it helps!
Comment · 3 months ago
Coauthor here, somewhat surprised to see this on HN. Any thoughts, questions, or feedback welcome.
Comment · 9 months ago
The secret ballot is usually considered a core goal of an elections system, blockchain involvement or not.
Comment · 9 months ago
I have not personally, but there's some fantastic work on the subject: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9152765?signou...
They find a few really bad issues. IIRC, the Swiss Post is looking into improving it, with the consultation of real cryptographers, so we'll see how that goes!
Comment · 9 months ago
You might be interested in some prior work on blockchain voting, it's a bit harder to get right than one might think, and actually introduces some problems [1,2].
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat... [2] https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/7/1/tyaa025/6...
Comment · 9 months ago
Hey all, coauthor here. Interesting to see it on Hacker News.
I'm a professor in Georgia Tech's CS dept that works on problems related to security, privacy, and public policy. (CV: https://mikespecter.com/)
Happy to answer any questions you all have.
Comment · 6 years ago
Hi! Check out our Usenix 2021 paper on exactly this topic. The key insight is to release private keys over time: