Chennai OCaml Meetup - January 2025

Join us for the January Chennai OCaml Meetup!

This month, we’ll have a few talks on OCaml topics, followed by informal discussions. It’s a chance to learn something new, share ideas, and meet others interested in OCaml.

Talk 1: Verifiable Vote Tallying Using Additive Homomorphism
Speaker: Athish Pranav

Abstract: Existing End-to-End Verifiable (E2E-V) systems like Belenios and ElectionGuard rely on distributed trust models or are vulnerable to decryption compromises, making them less suitable for general elections. Our approach introduces a tamper-evident commitment to votes through cryptographic hashes derived from homomorphic encryption schemes such as Paillier.

The proposed system ensures voter acknowledgment without revealing the vote, thereby preventing coercion while enabling public verification
of results. We also explore transitioning to quantum-secure encryption like Regev for future-proofing the system. Deployment considerations for General elections, security analysis, and limitations are discussed, offering a robust framework to improve the electoral process. We are implementing the voting application as a mirage unikernels and combining it with FIDES framework in Shakti hardware for memory protection using compartmentalization.

Talk 2: How Multicore GC works
Speaker: Sudha Parimala

OCaml 5.0+ ships with the much-awaited Multicore support. The major challenge in its development was building a multicore-enabled garbage collector. In this talk, through a series of illustrations, we will explore the internals of the OCaml 5 garbage collector and gain insights into how OCaml programmers can optimize their programs for better performance.