In this first edition of our new crypto anarchy series, we will talk about distributed online systems and homomorphic encryption. A key emphasis will be placed on online voting, and why it is not as hard a problem to implement securely with recent advances in crypto over the last 2 decades.

This will be a high level introduction to the subject with an emphasis on the engineering challenges of such a system. We will also show how a similar system is used at foulab to provide a reasonable degree of anonymized access control to the hackerspace.

A quick overview of a number of defensive crypto engineering design choices will also be looked at.