[TYPES/announce] PhD/postdoc vacancy on the verification of cryptographic protocols at Aarhus University

[Bas Spitters]

We are looking for a strong PhD-candidate at Aarhus University (DK).
There may be possibilities for a postdoc position. Please contact me
for more information.

Project “Verified voting protocols and blockchains”.
A description of the project can be found below.
Deadline:1 November 2023.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://phd.nat.au.dk/for-applicants/open-calls/november-2023/verified-voting-protocols-and-blockchains__;!!IBzWLUs!Qrkga1rTiYXytpoEhKNZ2JECR40EgAgv5kfrLyhsYrzl1tFEXO5Yrb7luq2y0R8SmF3Msfu98v_UzmnYWPKz3cETEm5gmaoZBdFjksw$ 

The PhD positions include full tuition waiver and a very competitive
scholarship.
Aarhus University provides international students with a safe and
stable environment, a high standard of living and a wealth of social
opportunities.
Besides having an excellent reputation that enables our PhD graduates
to find outstanding employment prospects, Aarhus University offers
attractive working conditions, research support and campus resources.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://cs.au.dk/education/phd/__;!!IBzWLUs!Qrkga1rTiYXytpoEhKNZ2JECR40EgAgv5kfrLyhsYrzl1tFEXO5Yrb7luq2y0R8SmF3Msfu98v_UzmnYWPKz3cETEm5gmaoZSjd4cBI$ 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://international.au.dk/__;!!IBzWLUs!Qrkga1rTiYXytpoEhKNZ2JECR40EgAgv5kfrLyhsYrzl1tFEXO5Yrb7luq2y0R8SmF3Msfu98v_UzmnYWPKz3cETEm5gmaoZjO8Ssso$ 

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This project is supported by the Danish DIREC research center. It is a
collaboration between Aarhus University, the Alexandra Institute and
Concordium ApS.
The aim of the project is work towards secure implementations of
Blockchain Voting Governance Protocols and Internet Voting Protocols.

Voting and blockchains are intimately connected. Voting is used in
blockchains for consensus, governance, and decentralized
organizations. Conversely, elections are based on trust, which means
that election systems ideally should be based on algorithms and data
structures that are already trusted. Blockchains provide such a
technology. They provide a trusted bulletin board, which can be used
as part of some voting protocols. Moreover, voting crucially depends
on establishing the identity of the voter to avoid fraud and to
establish eligibility verifiability.

Decades of research in voting protocols have shown how difficult it is
to combine the privacy of the vote with the auditability of the
election outcome. It is easy to achieve one without the other, but
hard to combine both into one protocol. Thus, the topic of this
research proposal is to investigate voting protocols and
their relation to blockchains.

The team will work on (machine-checked) security proofs of
these protocols and their implementations, for instance using tools
such as ConCert and SSProve which are built on the Coq proof
assistant.