This project aims to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in domains involving voting and collective decision making. There are many domains in which some form of balloting is required, such as voting on proposals or electing in charities, professional organisations, clubs, trades unions, political parties, and private companies. It is important to run such ballots in a way that the result is accepted by all parties even where they do not trust each other. Current election systems require trusted individuals or third party organisations to run the ballot, which places reliance on their honesty and also on their ability to secure the election against any form of malicious attack. The fact that many such elections are still run using paper ballots demonstrates that this remains a real concern for organisations despite the advantages of convenience, cost and efficiency that electronic elections may bring. Given the associated security issues around the management of electronic votes, it is natural to consider the use of DLT platforms to provide a trustworthy basis for such systems in recording and aggregating votes, since they can provide transparency and an agreed tamper-proof record of the election. The project will investigate how this can be achieved while maintaining the necessary levels of security, and in particular how this is impacted by the underlying design of any particular choice of distributed ledger technology. The introduction of DLT into the voting domain also enables new possibilities for voting schemes. Political systems around the world have evolved complex election systems, for example single transferrable vote, where the results are cumbersome and time-consuming to calculate, but where the result is considered to better reflect the will of the electorate and hence worthy of this effort. However for non-political elections run with paper ballots this effort is generally prohibitive. Social choice theory within Political Science considers how different voting systems can affect how choices are made, and the ability to support such systems electronically enables the viability of schemes whose tallying mechanisms are more complex but which may give results which match more closely the collective choice of the voters. Hence the project will also investigate the potential impact on organisations and their governance and decision making processes through the variation of voting schemes. DLT also supports the management of more complex voting rights held by individuals. In many private company applications, particular shareholdings have specific rights and privileges. For example, the originating shareholders of a company may have pre-emption rights over the sale of shares by later shareholders, or priority rights to compensation in the event of a bankruptcy of the company. At present, for privately-held companies, shareholdings and the rights associated to them are generally recorded in written contracts and the relevant information held only in spreadsheets. At least in principle, DLTs could readily support voting in such contexts, with the specific rights accruing to particular shareholders being encoded in agreed smart contracts - i.e., automated (self-executing) performance scripts that also sit on the distributed ledger. A strand of this project will aim to explore the practicality of such ideas. Although the project is not investigating political or statutary elections at this stage, a strand of the project will consider the longer term roadmap for the technology. As well as considering the longer term impact on organisations through new governance and decision making possibilities, this will include consideration of how DLT may play a part in emerging designs for electronic voting systems for political elections.

Security systems break because design practices focus too much on mechanisms, at the expense of clearly-defined properties. The vision of this research is to bring about a shift of emphasis to highlight the properties that security systems are expected to provide. This will be done by developing methods for verification of security systems. I will focus on a selection of interconnected real-world problems that are of great importance to society, but that are currently in need of greater industry/academe cooperation. The combination of fundamental research with close collaboration with industry, government and users is expected to achieve significant results and impact. I will develop and apply new methods and techniques to create and analyse solutions in three areas:* Trusted computing is an industry-led technology that aims to root security in hardware. Since its launch, academics including me have discovered significant issues that threaten to undermine its potential at providing a range of security benefits. This has arisen because industry does not have the expertise to analyse the protocols.* Electronic voting is an application currently attracting significant interest from government and industry, but numerous security issues have resulted in failure of confidence among politicians, commentators and public alike.* Privacy for citizens using electronic services is hotly debated by journalists and user groups and politicians, but has been substantially eroded by new technologies and policies.In these three areas, there is currently the risk of significant waste of resources on inappropriate or unaccepted technologies, resulting in user disempowerment and exclusion. The outcomes of this fellowship are intended to address that risk.A distinguishing feature of the proposal is the substantial engagement with industry and user groups that are active in these three areas. As a result of discussions with them, several organisations have committed significant resources, including cash contribution, manager and developer time, and access to users and experts.