Questions on code structure and designing a sidebar feature

[Harry Tian]

Hello,

We are a group of students working on a project that examines and tests attacks against electronic voting machines through modifying Helios. We have some questions regarding the code.

Firstly, why are there separate encryption/decryption/verification algorithms for python (in helios/crypto) and javascript (in heliosbooth/js/jscrypto)? Where does the python encryption functions get used?

We were also interested in implementing a descriptive runtime output sidebar feature in Helios. The sidebar will comprehensively report to the user what Helios is doing at each step of execution, such as election fingerprint verification, ballot encryption, auditing, etc. Where/which files should we look to modify for this? Is there a main javascript file containing all the event functions for Helios?

Thank you!

Best,

Harry. T

[Warwick McNaughton]

Hi Harry

You might be interested in a collation of academic studies of Helios which I have put together here:

https://wrmack.github.io/helios-server-docs/site/ref_literature/

This paper discusses the use of cryptography in the browser (in section 4.2):

http://www.uclouvain.be/crypto/services/download/publications.pdf.9f0ecdd41f6c72bc.636831312e706466.pdf

My understanding is that the voting booth is decoupled from the server until the vote is cast and the encryption of the vote is undertaken totally in the browser using javascript rather than in the server using python.

Warwick

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[Ben Adida]

Hi Harry,

A couple of quick answers:

- the cryptography in JavaScript is used in the browser, while in Python it's used on the server. The server-side functions are needed for homomorphic tabulation, decryption, and proofs. There is also a fallback for super old web clients where the ballot encryption is done on the server, but I don't think there are any remaining browsers that need this.

- there isn't one file that contains all of the events in Helios. Helios is written in 12+ year old JavaScript, so no great framework to manage the client-side app back then. At some point, it will be nice to build a more modern client, of course.

-Ben

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