Computer Science: Fully Funded PhD Studentship in Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge for Public Good

Recently, many councils in Wales started using single transferable vote (STV) method for counting ballots. While counting plaintext ballots using STV method is straightforward, but a rank-based ballot may leak the voter’s preferences if published publicly in plaintext, as the ranking order can reveal detailed information about the voter’s identity. Therefore, encryption is necessary to hide the ranking. However, STV method becomes considerably more complex with encrypted ballots. Our goal is to develop an algorithm/protocol to count encrypted ballots using the STV method. Our first point of investigation will be zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge-- ZkSNARK. Subsequently, we will formalise the front-end (R1CS) and back-end (Groth16) of ZkSNARK in the Coq theorem prover and use this formalisation to encode our STV algorithm on encrypted ballots.  This approach aims to ensure both the correctness and privacy of the tallying process, paving the way for verifiable and secure election systems that are resistant to coercion.

Requirement: You are not required to be an expert in Coq or Cryptography; familiarity with Coq and Cryptography is fine. However, you should be comfortable with a functional programming language Haskell, OCaml, etc.

Funding Comment

Covers full tuition, £20,780 stipend (2025/26), plus up to £1,000 yearly for research costs.

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