It sounds like the technical problem is that they spent more time thinking about cryptography itself than they did about the prudent application of it.
Confidentiality that undermines availability might be good cryptography but it violates basic tenets of information security.
we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally, [1]
How is someone losing their key a "technical problem"? Is that hard to put the actual reason in the summary?
we will adopt a 2-out-of-3 threshold mechanism for the management of private keys [1]
The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?
I would have thought cryptography experts losing keys would be pretty rare, like a fire at a Sea Parks.
[1]: https://www.iacr.org/news/item/27138
> How is someone losing their key a "technical problem"?
The human half of the problem is the loss of the key; the technical half of the problem is being unable to decrypt the election results.
> The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?
I don't think there's a scenario in which a 2-of-3 threshold is a significant risk to IACR.
It sounds like the technical problem is that they spent more time thinking about cryptography itself than they did about the prudent application of it.
Confidentiality that undermines availability might be good cryptography but it violates basic tenets of information security.
Thanks for the reminder of a brilliant IT crowd moment!
https://archive.is/NOnfx
Nerds do tend to forget that people make procedural errors.
in other words, someone didnt like the election results