[Cryptography] When your security is too secure

[Henry Baker]

No wonder that the American nuclear launch code prior to 1977 was "00000000"; the US generals didn't trust the complex system that had been devised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Sent: Nov 23, 2025 3:16 PM
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Subject: [Cryptography] When your security is too secure

https://iacr.org/news/item/27138

This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election
conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have
encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the
election and accessing the final tally.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three
members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees,
each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly
decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two
trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents
of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption
shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private
key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute
their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the
decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or
verify the final outcome of this election.
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