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dbosk / crocus

Securely and privately verifiable protests
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Trusted witness version, untrusted witness version #208

Open dbosk opened 4 years ago

dbosk commented 4 years ago

63

dbosk commented 4 years ago

A key concern I have is the reliance on witnesses to authenticate participation. The authors suggest that either trusted witnesses are used or some number of untrusted ones. I do not see how untrusted witnesses can lead to a secure outcome, even if there is a large number of them, since there is no reason not to believe that all of them are colluding to inflate the crowd size.

Using trusted witnesses, on the other hand, has similar pitfalls to the existing approaches, as discussed in the prior work section: it is hard to find witnesses that all opposing factions will trust, and it is hard to scale this approach to large crowds. Since the distance-bounding protocol is not specified in this paper, it is hard to assess its practical limitations, but typical phone-to-phone communications have relatively small range, so to count all participants in a large protest witnesses need to be deployed throughout the protest.