we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally, [1]
How is someone losing their key a "technical problem"? Is that hard to own up and put the actual reason in the summary? It's not like they have stockholders to placate.
we will adopt a 2-out-of-3 threshold mechanism for the management of private keys [1]
The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?
I would have thought cryptography experts losing keys would be pretty rare, like a fire at a Sea Parks.
It sounds like the technical problem is that they spent more time thinking about cryptography itself than they did about the prudent application of it.
Confidentiality that undermines availability might be good cryptography but it violates basic tenets of information security.
I'd make a joke about NSA conspiracies here but I'm 95% sure some kind of Foucault's Pendulum / QAnon thing would happen and 6 years from now I'd be the contrarian on a bunch of threads about how the IACR had been suborned to suppress cryptanalysis of MLKEM.
How is someone losing their key a "technical problem"? Is that hard to own up and put the actual reason in the summary? It's not like they have stockholders to placate.
we will adopt a 2-out-of-3 threshold mechanism for the management of private keys [1]
The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?
I would have thought cryptography experts losing keys would be pretty rare, like a fire at a Sea Parks.
[1]: https://www.iacr.org/news/item/27138
Confidentiality that undermines availability might be good cryptography but it violates basic tenets of information security.
"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should"
The human half of the problem is the loss of the key; the technical half of the problem is being unable to decrypt the election results.
> The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?
I don't think there's a scenario in which a 2-of-3 threshold is a significant risk to IACR.
I believe the DNSSEC uses a 5 of 7 approach.