Cryptography group cancels election results after official loses secret key

According to the IACR, one of the three independent trustees responsible for the cryptographic key material irretrievably lost their private key, making it impossible to complete the decryption and verify the final election outcome stored in Helios, an open source voting system used to cast and count votes verifiably and privately. The association said votes had already been submitted and tallied, but the decryption step could not be completed, so the results could not be obtained or verified.

To reduce the risk of a similar incident, the IACR will change its key-management mechanism so elections will require only two of the three key shares in future. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to provide his share, has resigned and will be replaced by Michel Abdalla. The IACR noted that the associate is holding a new election that starts Friday and runs through 20 December.