Protecting privacy at the ballot box with secure multiparty computation

The project, named High Assurance

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Compositional Cryptography: Languages and Environments (HACCLE), is working to utilize the areas of security and programming language to solve the questions and hurdles created by current methods.
"The challenge is that there are a wide range of questions that need to be addressed when developing those applications," said Milind Kulkarni, an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering, who is leading the project. "And every time you answer these questions differently, it takes a heroic effort from cryptographic experts to deliver an effective solution."

Kulkarni said the Purdue researchers are working to take the task of developing secure multiparty applications out of the realm of experts and make it accessible to ordinary programmers.

HACCLE is intended to provide programming languages and the verification, optimization, and execution tools to address the challenges currently encountered. The ultimate goal is to allow programmers to write secure multiparty computation applications with minimum effort and maximum performance.

Additional faculty involved in project research are Tiark Rompf, Roopsha Samanta, Hemanta Maji, Aniket Kate, Christina Garman, Benjamin Delaware and Jeremiah Blocki, all professors in Purdue's Department of Computer Science. The group is collaborating with Reservoir Labs, a technology and solutions company in New York City.

The project recently was awarded grant funding by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Through IARPA's Homomorphic Encryption Computing Techniques with Overhead Reduction, the HACCLE project will receive up to $10.7 million.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-privacy-ballot-multiparty.html