6.897 Spring 2004
Homework 3
Handed out: 4/16/2004
Due: 4/29/2004

The homework is to write a "referee's report" on the
paper "Verifiable Mixing (Shuffling) of El-Gamal Pairs"
by Andrew Neff, written four months ago (dated 12/31/2004).
This paper more-or-less includes by reference his earlier
paper (reference [23], "A verifiable secret shuffle and its
applications to e-voting", from ACM-CCS 2001), so please
consider the assignment to include portions of that paper
as needed.

Pretend that I am the editor of a journal that has a broad
but technical readership.  Your report should offer constructive
criticism of the paper.  Try to understand the proposed method,
and point out where the exposition is unclear, unmotivated,
poorly organized, etc.   If you get stuck, explain exactly
where and why.  If you think it should be organized differently,
explain why and how.  

There are many refereeing guidelines on the web, here are a couple
that I found using google:
    http://www.computer.org/tpds/taskofreferee.html?SMSESSION=NO
    http://www.may.ie/nirsa/geo-pub/geo-refereeing.html

Do NOT include an answer to the question "Should this paper
be published?" (possibly with revisions).  Merely give 
constructive feedback to the author, noting strengths,
weaknesses, errors, improvements, etc.  

Your report WILL be sent to Andy Neff.  Please indicate
in a cover letter whether you wish it to be sent anonymously
or not.  

If you feel that your report might be useful to others
attempting to read Neff's paper, and so you wish to have it
posted on our class web site, please also let me know.  

Feel free to collaborate and discuss the paper between yourselves,
but the write-up should be your own.  Please submit your report
by email as a text file or as a pdf file.