Re: [Belenios-discuss] Helios-C and the Majority Judgment

[Stéphane Glondu <stephane.glondu AT inria.fr>]

Hello Julien,

Le 02/05/2019 à 00:03, Julien Moutinho a écrit :
> I'd like to let you know that for the last two weeks my night-time hobby
> has been to try to understand your work on Helios-C/Belenios,
> by reading parts of the published papers, and coding parts
> of its core logic in another language (Haskell).
> Not only because I like Haskell more than OCaml,
> but also because I happen to have already implemented in Haskell
> lots of algorithms for the voting method I wish to better integrate
> in Helios-C: the Majority Judgment.
> 
> Though I was able to grasp the simplest parts of Helios-C,
> I have no background in cryptography whatsoever,
> so if it's the right place to ask, at some point I may need some help:
> either to understand some parts of Helios-C
> or to validate the few adaptations I may want
> to apply to its specification.

Did you see the Belenios specification?

  http://www.belenios.org/specification.pdf

I believe it is the most practical guide to implementation.

About Majority Judgement: it can be encoded with the homomorphic tally
of (current) Belenios by encoding each "choice" as a "question" and each
"preference" as a "choice. This is reasonnable as long as there are not
too many "choices x preferences" (let's say, < 50). Indeed, the size of
the ballot is proportional to this product.

However, we are also implementing mixnets (in progress), which allow to
recover each individual ballot after tally. The main motivation is to
support Condorcet-style voting, but they also allow a simpler encoding
of Majority Judgement without the size issue mentioned above. I was
considering adding support of Majority Judgement to Belenios this way,
what do you think?

> For those of you who want to dive into the code, it's also free software,
> whose documentation is here: 
> https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hjugement-protocol
> and repository there: git://git.autogeree.net/hjugement

Glad to hear you took the free software path. Do you plan some kind of
interoperability with Belenios? An alternative, public and independent,
verifier for Belenios would be great.

Thanks for your interest,

-- 
Stéphane