Secure MPC-Sortition

Secure MPC-Sortition: Consolidating Innovations in Democracy and Cryptography

Maas, Wouter (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science; TU Delft Cyber Security; TU Delft Intelligent Systems)

Erkin, Z. (mentor)
Urbano, Julián (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Computer Science and Engineering

CSE3000 Research Project

2021-07-02

Globally, citizens’ assemblies have been gaining momentum as a way to counter dissatisfaction in democracies. Central to the citizens’ assembly is sortition, the process of randomly selecting political representatives given certain demographic criteria. In order to have an assembly representative of the population, personal data is necessary to perform the sortition, making participant privacy a matter of concern when guaranteeing fairness of the process. Secure multi-party computation (MPC)makes it possible to perform calculations on encrypted data from multiple sources without revealing it to the other processing parties or data contributors. This paper outlines two sortition designs that use MPC to guarantee participant privacy during the sortition process. Design 1 allows participants to hide their personal details to the citizens’ assembly organisers. Design 2 makes it possible for involved local government to contribute citizen data to the sortition. Different domain experts were interviewed as a means to survey the needs of the sortition community and to provide feedback on the designs. We found that little research has yet been conducted on the effects of increased privacy on sign-up rates for deliberative events, creating a potential avenue for future research.

MPC
Multiparty computation
Sortition
citizens' assembly
deliberative democracy
privacy
security

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:12bfe5b5-f545-4245-9ef3-3c609ed1ed92

Student theses

bachelor thesis

© 2021 Wouter Maas