International Association for Cryptologic Research Reruns Leadership Election
The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), a global non-profit organization focused on cryptology, has announced the cancellation of its leadership election results. The organization will rerun the election following the inability to decrypt the electronic voting results due to a lost encryption key.
Election Process and Key Management
Votes for three Director and four Officer positions were cast between October 17 and November 16. The IACR utilized Helios, an open-source electronic voting system that employs cryptography to ensure vote secrecy.
Access to the election results required a multi-party decryption process. Three independent members were designated as trustees, each entrusted with one-third of the encrypted key material. All three segments were necessary to collectively decrypt the final results.
Incident and Resolution
The IACR reported that one of the designated trustees lost their assigned key segment, which made the decryption of the election results impossible. The organization described the incident as "an honest but unfortunate human mistake."
Consequently, the IACR confirmed that the original election results could not be accessed. The association plans to rerun the election and stated its intention to implement "new safeguards" to prevent similar issues in future voting procedures. While two of the trustees had successfully uploaded their portions of the encrypted material, the third trustee's share was not provided.