desimmons / lemo

Lemo - (L)iquid D(emo)cracy

Lemo is an implementation of a cryptographically verifiable democracy.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

To run this project easily, install miniconda.

Installing

Clone the GitHub repository into a local directory of your choice:

git clone [email protected]:desimmons/lemo.git

Move into the cloned directory:

cd lemo

Create a Python environment with all the lemo dependencies installed using Conda:

conda env create -f environment.yml

Running the tests

To run an example:

python ./src/python/examples.py

What it does

Lemocracy is a cryptographic implementation of a liquid democracy: a direct democracy that allows citizens to delegate their vote to representatives of their choice. In detail, it allows us to create:

1. A citizen, represented by a name and public key (of which there is a corresponding private key). The citizen's public/private key pair is generated using jb_key = crypto_tools.generate_citizen_pub_priv_key(entropy=PRNG("seed")). The citizen is then defined to be the dictionary joey_b = {"citizen_name": "Joe Blogs", "citizen_public_id": key["citizen_public_id"]}
2. A Citizens class, that:
   • issues citizenship via Citizens().add_citizen(joey_b). The Citizens object saves citizenship via an array of the citizen's public keys.
   • allows its citizens to add and remove rule objects (the Rule class will be explained next) via Citizens().add_rule(rule_1) and Citizens().remove_rule(rule_1)
3. A Rule class that:
   • instantiates rule objects using a rule file contained in the ./rules directory,
   • stores a cryptographic hash of the rule file so that any adjustment to the rule file will easy to spot,
   • allows citizens to vote via the Rule().vote(citizens, joey_b, vote_signature, vote) method. For a citizen to be able to vote successfully, they must:
     • be a citizen of the citizens object passed to the vote method,
     • construct a valid vote_signature object using their private key and their vote, a boolean.

How it does it

TODO

Authors

• David Simmons - GitHub, Scholar

TODO list

• Create unit test examples.
• Create frontend Lemo website.
• Integrate homomorphic encryption into application.
• Create an identification platform

Acknowledgments

• TODO