Defeating Malicious Terminals in an Electronic Voting System

  • Daniel Hanley Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Jeff King Georgia Institute of Technology
  • André dos Santos Georgia Institute of Technology

Resumo


The advent of electronic voting gives rise to a new threat: Adversaries may execute undetectable, automated attacks against the system. Elections are often secured through complex policies, which may be difficult to enforce; Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) provide an inexpensive alternative. The goal of this study is to introduce a unique application of CAPTCHAs that allows a human to transmit a message securely across an untrusted medium, and this has direct implications in the domain of electronic voting. We assume that the voter is equipped with a trusted voting device capable of digitally signing the vote. A trusted tallier generates a CAPTCHA-encrypted ballot, which contains a one-time pad, a mapping of candidates to values. This CAPTCHA is sent to the user across an untrusted voting terminal. The user transmits to the trusted device a value corresponding to his chosen candidate, which is signed using a blind signature scheme and transmitted to the tallier. Finally, the tallier then translates this value into the voter’s selected candidate. All steps of such a protocol must be defined such that they are usable by all voters, and we will consider the usability of some example CAPTCHA-based voting systems.

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Publicado
26/09/2005
HANLEY, Daniel; KING, Jeff; SANTOS, André dos. Defeating Malicious Terminals in an Electronic Voting System. In: SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO DE SEGURANÇA DA INFORMAÇÃO E DE SISTEMAS COMPUTACIONAIS (SBSEG), 5. , 2005, Florianópolis. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2005 . p. 113-123. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbseg.2005.21527.