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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Peter Ryan, Thea Peacock
Numerous cryptographic voting schemes have been proposed in recent years. Many of these have highly desirable formal security properties. However, as with all security systems, even a well-designed technical system can be undermined by implementation details or environmental factors, typically including human users, that violate (often implicit) assumptions of the design and evaluation. In `Cryptographic Voting Protocols: a System Perspective[11] Karlof et al perform a systems-based analysis of the Chaum [5] and Neff [17],[18],[19] schemes. They identify a number of vulnerabilities and discuss possible mitigations and counter-measures. In this paper, we examine the extent to which these vulnerabilities carry over to the Prêt á Voter scheme [6]. In addition, we describe some further systems-based vulnerabilities not identified in [11]. We also discuss some further threats, such as chain voting attacks, which do not apply to the Chaum or Neff schemes but to which Prêt á Voter is vulnerable, unless appropriate countermeasures are deployed. It turns out that Prêt á Voter is remarkably robust to most of the vulnerabilities described in [11] and here.
Author(s): Ryan P Y A, Peacock T
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2005
Pages: 21
Print publication date: 01/09/2005
Source Publication Date: September 2005
Report Number: 929
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/929.pdf
