Although we have not officially announced any specific plan, it’s not a secret that at Sequent we’re developing our 2nd generation secure

Calling Go Code From Rust: A Google Trillian Story

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2023-01-24 11:00:05

Although we have not officially announced any specific plan, it’s not a secret that at Sequent we’re developing our 2nd generation secure voting platform, because we work out there in the open.

One of the most critical pieces of our 2nd-gen platform will be the bulletin board. In voting systems’ jargon, the bulletin board is a broadcast channel with memory that stores relevant election information such as cast votes, public keys and election results.

This is a hard nut to crack with conflicting requirements. That’s one of the wonderful aspects of voting technology: working in challenging problems.

We could debate what is the right technology to implement a bulletin board. There are different approaches others have tried, ranging from trying to use Ethereum or any other blockchain, using git as a simple and well-known hash-chain or perhaps using a database like PostgreSQL as the backend storage. None of those provide a satisfactory level of compliance with the requirements previously outlined. That might be the topic of some other post.

Long story short, Trillian is a tamper-evident log. Its github repository description is “A transparent, highly scalable and cryptographically verifiable data store.” Trillian is written in Go Language, and it allows to register entries in a log that other can query, monitor and request inclusion of new entries. It’s transparent and tamper-evident because it stores the log using a Merkle Tree, which is just a tree of hashes of data where the leaves are the entries, and it allows to efficiently add entries, verify entries order and inclusion, and compare an evolving tree of entries and see that two different tree snapshots are consistent, i.e. older entries are still there in the expected location.