Source: Ars Technica
“One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system. The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. … Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results. ‘Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,’ the IACR said.” (11/21/25)