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I'm working on a reference implementation for the crypto protocol in my thesis 😂 so far I've implemented ElGamal encryption and Pedersen commitments over a quadratic residue group, and have written a basic server that can store commitments sent by users

the purpose of the protocol is to add verifiability to postal voting :)

Oh neat! Encryption stuff goes way over my head. Much respect! 🤩

💛! What you don't see is the solid two hours I spent today wondering why everything decrypted to 1, until I realised I was taking the modulus by the incorrect of the two prime numbers in the system...

Arrgh sounds like the months I spent trying to figure out why my polymorphic identity function wouldn't type check, when I'd messed up my variable binding implementation.

curse ye De Bruijn indices! so confusing!

I've gotten into a bit of a pickle with Rust's type checker... my Elem struct has a reference to the Group it's from, and then an ElGamal struct has a reference to both a Group and an Elem. The problem is: when I create a Group in the new() function, I can't take an Elem...

... because the Group still belongs to new() and not the about-to-be-created ElGamal :'( not sure how to resolve it, I've worked around it by cloning a value but that's not very satisfying

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7:50 AM · Feb 5, 2020Twitter Web App

Hmmmm interesting! Sometimes cloning is a good idea (sometimes folks get too hungup on not doing so), but there might be a better way. If you want me to look over it anytime - sometimes this stuff can be hard to explain without context - I'd be more than happy to help!

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Another solution miight be to use reference counting, and have a weak reference somewhere (to avoid a cycle). But I dunno if that fits your use case.