IACR News item: 07 December 2014
Giulia Alberini, Tal Moran, Alon Rosen
ePrint ReportWe propose an ``effort based\'\' polling protocol whose results can be publicly verified by constructing a ``responder certification graph\'\' whose nodes are labeled by responders\' replies to the poll, and whose edges cross-certify that adjacent nodes correspond to honest participants. Cross-certification is achieved using a newly introduced (privately verifiable) ``Private Proof of Effort\'\' (PPE). In effect, our protocol gives a general method for converting privately-verifiable proofs into a publicly-verifiable protocol. The soundness of the transformation relies on expansion properties of the certification graph.
Our results are applicable to a variety of settings in which crowd-sourced information gathering is required. This includes crypto-currencies, political polling, elections, recommendation systems, viewer voting in TV shows, and prediction markets.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.