Almost entirely correct mixing with applications to voting

Dan Boneh, Philippe Golle
2002 Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Computer and communications security - CCS '02  
In order to design an exceptionally efficient mix network, both asymptotically and in real terms, we develop the notion of almost entirely correct mixing, and propose a new mix network that is almost entirely correct. In our new mix, the real cost of proving correctness is orders of magnitude faster than all other mix nets. The trade-off is that our mix only guarantees "almost entirely correct" mixing, i.e it guarantees that the mix network processed correctly all inputs with high (but not
more » ... helming) probability. We use a new technique for verifying correctness. This new technique consists of computing the product of a random subset of the inputs to a mix server, then require the mix server to produce a subset of the outputs of equal product. Our new mix net is of particular value for electronic voting, where a guarantee of almost entirely correct mixing may well be sufficient to announce instantly the result of a large election. The correctness of the result can later be verified beyond a doubt using any one of a number of much slower proofs of perfectcorrectness, without having to mix the ballots again.
doi:10.1145/586119.586121 fatcat:z2oqz6v7hvc6nblx5nj2l37pxu