Joan Josep Piles

E-cognocracy and its voting process

e-Cognocracy [J.M. Moreno-Jimenez, J.M. Polasek, e-Democracy and knowledge: a multicriteria framework for the new democratic era, Journal of Multicriteria Decision Analysis 12 (2003) 163-176 [15]; J.M. Moreno-Jimenez, J.M. Polasek, e-Cognocracy and the participation of immigrants in e-governance, TED Conference on e-government 2005. Electronic democracy: The challenge ahead, Schriftenreihe Informatik, vol. 13, University Rudolf Trauner-Verlag, 2005, pp 18-26 [16]; G.E. Kersten, e-Democracy and participatory decision processes: lessons from e-negotiation experiments, Journal Multi-criteria Decision Analysis 12 (2003) 127-143 [13]] is a new democratic system that focuses on the creation and social diffusion of the knowledge gained from the scientific resolution of highly complex problems associated with public decision making. In this scenario, e-voting is not limited to the choice of a given political party, but to the extraction of the relevant knowledge. Even though e-voting systems have been widely studied, some situations are still not covered by the conventional literature, and this makes it necessary to consider certain variations to the main schema. In this paper, we will present one such lacuna (associated with e-cognocracy), and will examine the changes required in conventional e-voting processes and their implications.

Security approaches in e-cognocracy

E-cognocracy is a democratic model focussed on the joint creation of Social Wisdom through the Internet by means of the extraction and diffusion of knowledge related with the scientific resolution of highly complex problems associated with public decision making. To this end, e-cognocracy allows for the consideration of several rounds during the resolution process. The linkability of votes, the intensity of preferences and the identification of the arguments that support choices, among other matters, require the design of a specific e-voting process the e-cognocracy, e-cognising. This paper presents various implementations of the technology, commencing with an initial proof of concept and going on to the use of smart cards to permit remote use of the system and influence the level of perceived confidence among users, eliminating the role of one of the confidence authorities formerly required to ensure appropriate system security.

Secure Trust Management with Source Routing Protocol for MANETs

A MANET, in order to work properly, needs its nodes to work collaboratively. This is not always the case, and thus tools are developed to detect and identify uncooperative nodes. In this paper we present TADSR, a protocol based on an already existing secure routing protocol on top of which it adds trust management features. Our aim is to detect rogue nodes, and also to improve the overall performance of the original protocol. The information gathering process will encompass both direct means and an indirect process through which other nodes will provide their own assessments. Then, a punishments and prizes system will try to get involved as many nodes as possible to improve the network performance.

Securization of policy making social computing. An application to e-cognocracy

Policy making social computing conform a set of social software tools that deal with the e-participation of citizens in policy making, that is to say, with the conjoint (representatives and citizens) design and selection through the internet of public policies. E-cognocracy is a cognitive democracy oriented to the extraction and sharing of knowledge associated with the scientific resolution of public decision making problems related with the governance of society. This model of democracy takes advantage of the potential of the Knowledge Society with the incorporation of the knowledge and the preferences of the actors involved in the decision making process. This uses different rounds in order to incorporate the preferences through an e-voting module and the arguments that support the individual positions through e-discussion. Considering e-cognocracy as the democracy model that supports interaction between citizens and their representatives in the construction of a better world, this paper presents a new proposal for the technological securization of the e-voting (prioritization) and e-discussion stages of e-cognocracy. This new suggestion, in which the electoral authority has been eliminated through the use of short linkable ring signatures, is a more simple and efficient system than our previous proposals.

Securisation of the discussion stage in e-cognocracy

E-cognocracy (Moreno-Jimenez, 2003, 2004, 2006) is a cognitive democracy oriented to the extraction and sharing of knowledge associated with the scientific resolution of public decision making problems related with the governance of society. This model of democracy takes advantage of the potential of the knowledge society by means of the incorporation of the knowledge and the preferences of the actors involved in the decision making process. This is carried out by using different rounds to incorporate the preferences and a collaborative tool for the discussion stage. The technological security of the voting process has been studied in previous papers of our research group (Piles et al., 2006, 2007; Moreno-Jimenez et al., 2008; Salazar et al., 2008). Now we cope with the security of the discussion stage, taking into account either registered and non-registered individuals.

Enhancing the trust and perceived security in e-cognocracy

e-Cognocracy is a new, creative, innovative and cognitive democratic system based on the evolution of living systems which focuses on the extraction and social diffusion of the knowledge derived from the scientific resolution of highly complex problems associated with public decision making related to the governance of society. Among the many tools needed to fully develop e-cognocracy, we will focus in e-voting, as it is the first needed to gather the information supplied by the citizens. One of the things that may drive people away from this kind of systems is their complexity. In this paper we present an e-voting protocol designed to work with e-cognocracy, much simpler than the previously existing one [1], through the use of short linkable ring signatures. Short linkable ring signatures are a cryptographic primitive that allows one person to sign as a member of a group, but without giving any information about the identity of the signer and with no previous set up and, furthermore, all the signatures from the same signer can be linked together but keeping the anonymity. The key element they present is that, unlike other schemas, they have a constant size (making them independent of the number of people in the group).

ADSR: Authenticated DSR

MANETs have two characteristics that make traditional routing protocols cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to achieve their objectives: firstly, the lack of a default infrastructure; secondly, the variability of this infrastructure once the nodes forming the network move themselves and vary their relative position to the other nodes. Owing to this, specific routing protocols are developed for MANETs. Bearing in mind that the characteristics of these networks limit the available resources (power consumption, bandwidth), incorporating security to routing protocols in an optimal way is not easy. In this paper we present a secure routing protocol based on DSR that employs elliptic curve cryptography to sign the route discovery packets. It also uses the aggregate signature scheme which allows us to compact M signatures of M different messages, even if the signatures are from M different signers, in one single signature.

Efficient ways of prime number generation for ring signatures

The authors describe two different algorithms to perform efficiently the ring signature keys generation. Given an integer size, l, their algorithms find efficiently (memory and time, respectively) two distinct l/2-bit primes (e 1, e 2) such that e = 2e 1 e 2 + 1 will be a prime integer. With a naive algorithm one only needs to store O(l) bits (more specifically, only one l/2-integer), and need, in average, O(l 4) basic l-bit operations. With the second algorithm, one not only improves this computational complexity O(l 7/2), but also needs to use, in average, O(l 3/2) bits. The authors consider these algorithms useful for implementing ring signatures in mobile devices where there exist strong time and space constraints.

Securization of e-Cognocracy

E-cognocracy [1], [2], [3] is a cognitive democracy oriented to the extraction and sharing of knowledte related with the scientific resolution of public decision making problems related with the governance of society. This model of democracy takes advantage of the potential of the knowledge society by means of the incorporation of the knowledge and the preferences of the actors involved in the decision making process. This is carried out by using different rounds to incorporate the preferences and a collaborative tool for the discussion stage. The technological security of the voting process has been studied in previous papers of our research group [8], [9], [10], [11]. Now we cope with the security of the discussion stage, taking into account either registered and non registered individuals.