Abstract
Motivated by the challenging task of designing “secure” vote storage mechanisms, we study information storage mechanisms that operate in extremely hostile environments. In such environments, the majority of existing techniques for information storage and for security are susceptible to powerful adversarial attacks. We propose a mechanism for storing a set of at most $K$ elements from a large universe of size $N$ on write-once memories in a manner that does not reveal the insertion order of the elements. We consider a standard model for write-once memories, in which the memory is initialized to the all-zero state, and the only operation allowed is flipping bits from $0$ to $1$. Whereas previously known constructions were either inefficient (required $\Theta(K^2)$ memory), randomized, or employed cryptographic techniques which are unlikely to be available in hostile environments, we eliminate each of these undesirable properties. The total amount of memory used by the mechanism is linear in the number of stored elements and poly-logarithmic in the size of the universe of elements. We also demonstrate a connection between secure vote storage mechanisms and one of the classical distributed computing problems: conflict resolution in multiple-access channels. By establishing a tight connection with the basic building block of our mechanism, we construct the first deterministic and non-adaptive conflict resolution algorithm whose running time is optimal up to poly-logarithmic factors.
Highlights
We demonstrate a connection between secure vote storage mechanisms and one of the classical distributed computing problems: conflict resolution in multiple-access channels
In this paper we deal with the design of information storage mechanisms that operate in extremely hostile environments
The majority of existing techniques for information storage and for security are susceptible to powerful adversarial attacks
Summary
In this paper we deal with the design of information storage mechanisms that operate in extremely hostile environments. A randomized storage strategy may enable a covert channel: As multiple valid representations for the same abstract state exist, a maliciously designed storage mechanism can secretly embed information into the stored data by choosing one of these representations. Applications such as voting protocols may run in completely untrusted environments. This prevents any modification to the stored ballots after the polls close, and prevents poll workers from tampering with the content of the data structure while the storage device is in transit This approach does not require any cryptographic tools or computational assumptions, which makes it very suitable for the setting of hostile environments. We ignore the encoding procedure, and refer the reader’s attention to the fact that our storage strategy is write-once (i. e., the memory is initialized to the all-zero state, and the only operation allowed is flipping bits from 0 to 1)
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