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Internet Voting Security Threats Analysis

This document discusses security flaws in internet voting systems, specifically addressing denial of service (DoS) attacks. It defines DoS attacks as resource-depleting attacks that make a network unable to serve legitimate users. Distributed DoS attacks use multiple compromised systems to launch attacks, making them difficult to defend against. The document outlines the main types of DoS attacks, including those that consume bandwidth and exploit protocols. It notes these attacks are a serious threat to internet voting systems and can prevent voters from casting ballots if servers are overloaded.

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8 views11 pages

Internet Voting Security Threats Analysis

This document discusses security flaws in internet voting systems, specifically addressing denial of service (DoS) attacks. It defines DoS attacks as resource-depleting attacks that make a network unable to serve legitimate users. Distributed DoS attacks use multiple compromised systems to launch attacks, making them difficult to defend against. The document outlines the main types of DoS attacks, including those that consume bandwidth and exploit protocols. It notes these attacks are a serious threat to internet voting systems and can prevent voters from casting ballots if servers are overloaded.

Uploaded by

Danish Pawaskar
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

SECURITY FLAWS IN INTERNET VOTING

SYSTEM

Sandeep Mudana
Computer Science Department
University of Auckland
Email: smud022@[Link]

Abstract

With the rapid growth in computer networks and internet, internet voting system can
be a viable alternative for conducting an election and such a voting system must
provide the same level of security as ordinary paper based elections. This paper
discusses the various security threats for an online internet voting system and
describes the most common threat in the communication medium, i.e. Denial of
Service Attacks and its effects on the online voting system and describing few
measures taken to prevent these attacks. However this paper does not propose a new
online voting system. The paper also aims to provide a comparative overview of
different authors based on the security measures taken to prevent the denial of service
attacks.

1
Introduction

Internet Voting System is defined as a voting system, where we can cast our vote over
Internet and send the vote to the concern election authority or officer safely. Internet
voting is intended as a service to the electorate, so that the voters might have more
convenience to cast their vote. They can vote from any where in the world by any
computer connected to the Internet. The implementation of this internet voting system
requires various technical solutions to ensure accurate voter authentication, secrecy of
the ballot and security. As a voting method, any voting system (internet voting system
or electronic voting system) needs confidence, without security there is no
confidence. When designing any security architecture of any internet voting system,
they should consider the insecurity of the communication medium. There are many
security threats that are concerned with the internet for many commercial transactions
like online payments, but still the advantages outweigh disadvantages for various
business activities. And still there are been many research going on whether internet
voting is safety or not, particularly in large organisation like any government elections
in any country, most of the research organisations are still uncertain whether a secure
internet voting system is suitable for a large organisation or not, because if something
goes wrong in the internet voting system, then it would effect the decision of the
entire country. And as the internet is open to the world, there are chances of various
kinds of threats. In this paper I would introduce different kinds of threats to an
internet voting system and as we know that the most common and important threat in
internet is denial of service attack, so I would explain what denial of service attack is,
types of attacks in denial of service and then explain how SERVE [1] or any internet
voting system is effected by that and what are the feasible solutions or methods to
avoid the attacks. [1, 2]

2
Requirements for Internet Voting System

According to [2] the basic requirements for the internet voting system are:

1. Authorization and authentication

Authorization is like only eligible or legal person can vote. For most of the
government elections they require a minimum age of 18 years old to cast their
vote. It can be done by the trusted authority and this process can be done
before the elections.

Authentication is the process where the validation of the vote is checked at the
time of casting the vote.

2. Mobility

This is one of the important factors in internet voting system; voter should be
able to cast his vote from any where in the world, as long they have the
required resources with them like internet, PC, etc. For this process
authorization, authentication and some security features need to be
implemented.

3. Flexibility

Voters should be able to use different types of devices like desktop, laptop,
mobile phones and different networks like Ethernet, wireless and dial-up
connections. [2]

3
4. Countability

This process is again dependent on authentication and authorisation. If these


processes are implemented then Countability accepts, and this is nothing but to
see that only the valid votes are counted.

5. Anonymity

There should be no link between a particular vote and the person who cast the
vote. In mandatory voting systems, the fact that the voter has cast a vote
should also be recorded. [2]

According to SERVE [1] the four main threats in internet voting


system: [1]

1. Viruses or Malicious Software


There is a threat of introducing any malicious software onto the
internet voting server before or on the Election Day by any
communication link or email and also if huge number of PCs (personal
computers) connected to the internet voting server, then any PC which
is infected with virus, there might be more number of chances to
spread the viruses to the voting server. The insecurity of the browser
setup or operating system at the user end may easily lead to install the
malicious software and which may change the confidentiality and
integrity of the vote or even the vote may be changed without the
knowledge of the voter before it is transmitted to the voting server. [1]

2. Hacking
If the links of the voting system is changed or hacked then the voter
may face difficulty in casting his vote, which may change the
confidentiality and integrity of the vote. [1]

4
3. Domain name service (DNS) attack
Attacks against the Domain name service could route traffic to an
attacker instead of to the legitimate vote service. [1]

4. Denial of service attacks (DOS)


This is a threat when the voter tries to cast his vote online and if the
hacker overloads the election web server then that may lead to prevent
the voter by not casting his vote. This type of attack is known as denial
of service attack. According to the report of the SERVE [1] this is one
of the serious attacks. [1]

What Denial of service attack is?

It is a resource-depleting attack on a network or on the internet such that the


network would no longer be able to serve legitimate users.

If a user is under denial of service attack then his system may become
unreachable due to the depletion of the resources of the system, thus the user
could loose the control of his system. The denial of service attack can be
directed at an operating system or at the network A proper planned denial of
service attack is difficult to detect and may cause severe problem to the
internet and as well as to the user. [4]

Denial of service attacks can happen by trying to flood the network with huge
amount of traffic. The network will unable to know whether its a legitimate
traffic or malicious traffic during the attack. [4]

Distributed Denial of service attacks (DDOS)

Distributed denial of service attacks are, thus, two stage attacks, the first
stage being penetration of a large number of machines and the second stage
the direct attack on the target. [4]

5
Distributed denial of service attacks are also hard to defend because the traffic
is generated on huge number of systems and targeted to a specific system.
These attacks are now very common and are primarily used for consuming up
the bandwidth resources of the server.

Distributed denial of service problems are expected to only become more


severe and serious in the future. For instance, they could be used in cyber
warfare to disable strategic business, government, public utility, and even
military sites. They can also be used by cyber gangsters to blackmail
companies that rely on internet connectivity for their revenues. [5]

Types of denial of service attacks

Denial of service attacks are basically divided into three different types [6]

1. Denial of service attack via bandwidth consumption

In this type of attack basically all the available bandwidth is consumed


and no bandwidth remains for legitimate user. Basically a network
might be flooded by UDP or ICMP ECHO packets to try and consume
all available bandwidth.

A simple bandwidth consumption attack can exploit the throughput


limits of servers or network equipment by focusing on high packet
rates sending large numbers of small packets. High packet rate
attacks typically overwhelm network equipment before the traffic
reaches the limit of available bandwidth. [6]

In practise, denial of service is often accomplished by high packet


rates, nor by sheer traffic volume. [6]

6
2. Denial of service attack via protocol attack

These attacks are almost directly target the host machines and these are
overcome by the patches in the operating system. Examples of protocol
attacks.

SYN flood is an asymmetric resource starvation attack in


which the attacker floods the victim with TCP SYN packets
and the victim allocates resources to accept perceived incoming
connections. [6]

In Smurf attack the attacker sends an ECHO request message


directed to broadcast addresses. When the request is received
by other systems in the network, all the systems in the network
will reply to the ECHO message to the target system and as the
number of request received from all the systems in the network
are high and as it is difficult to manage by the amount of buffer
allocated to the target system. [6]

3. Denial of service attack via logical attack

Logical attacks exploit vulnerabilities in network software, such as


web server, or the underlying TCP/IP stack. [6] Examples of logical
attacks are [6]

Teardrop
Land crafts
Ping of death
Naptha

7
How Denial of Service attack affects internet voting system

According to the SERVE [1] report, denial of service attack are serious risk for
SERVE [1]. The author says that it can affect the internet voting system in two
different ways of denial of service attacks, in the first attack an hacker may able to
change the network connection of the targeted web server with junk data that clogs
the network and prevents the user or voter by accessing the web server and casting his
vote. [1] A real time example in our daily life for this kind of attack is an email
address we get more than 100,s of junk mails which are not relevant to us, and we
waste most of the space in the mail box, by this we miss the required or wanted mails
as they bounced because the inbox is filled with the unnecessary junk mails.

In the same way the hacker could overload the election web server with irrelevant
data and prevent the electorate to cast his vote. On the internet, denial of service
attacks are often much more devastating, because internet denial of service attacks
can be automated with a computer, and because suck attacks can often be mounted
untraceably over the internet. [1]

In the second attack the hacker may put irrelevant resources with useless task on the
election web server so that the server is busy; as if the server is busy it may unable to
respond to the legitimate voters. This type of attack may mostly done on the last day
of the election, as most of the electorate may plan to cast their vote on the last day, so
if this kind of attack is done on the last day then most of the voters may fail to cast
their vote.

Feasible Measures for denial of service attack

According to Cyber vote [3] some of the security measures that can be taken to avoid
the denial of service attack [3]

As a measure of precaution, routers have to be upgraded with the implementation of


secure routing protocols. One of the more common methods of blocking a denial of

8
service attack is to set up a filter, or sniffer, on a network before a stream of
information reaches a sites web server. The filter can look for attacks by noticing
patterns or identifiers contained in the information. If a pattern comes in frequently,
the filter can be instructed to block messages containing that patter, protecting the
web server from having their lines tied up. [3]

According to [7] some of the security measures can be taken to avoid denial of service
attack.

Filtering all the packets in the network which are entering and leaving the
networks can prevent attacks from the neighbouring networks. This measure
requires installing ingress and egress packet filters on all routers. [7]

Upgrade the host computers with the latest security patches and techniques,
for example in case of the SYN flood attack. Increase the size of the
connection queue, decrease the time-out waiting for the three-way handshake
and employ vendor software patches to detect and circumvent the problem,
these can be done to protect the host computers can take to guard themselves
from the denial of service attack. [7]

Disabling the IP broadcast, the host computers will not used as amplifiers in
ICMP Flood and Smurf attacks. To prevent this attack all the neighbouring
networks need to be disable IP broadcast. [7]

Unused network services should be disabled to prevent tampering and attacks.


[7]

Monitoring the traffic patterns on the network can know when the system is
under attack, and can protect itself by the attack. [7]

9
Conclusion:

In this paper we discussed about the internet voting system and its security threats,
concentrating more on a particular threat namely, denial of service attacks on the
internet. The other variants of these kinds of attacks and few possible counter
measures that can be implemented in order to reduce the denial of service attacks.

In accordance with the arguments presented in the report [3] it can be derived that
there is no realistic prevention technique to avoid denial of service attacks. There exist
few precautionary measures which reduces the possibility of such attacks. According
to the authors of [7] they argue that there is no complete solution in preventing the
denial of service attacks, only few measures can be taken to avoid and defend to these
attacks.

From the above articles and arguments produced by the authors of these articles I
conclude that there are no complete defensive techniques existing for the resisting
denial of service attacks. But only they are some precautionary measures which can
be taken to avoid and defend the denial of service attacks. Hence I conclude that
without the complete prevention of these attacks its not a good idea to implement
online internet voting system for any organisation like any countrys government
elections, as the total outcome of the election depends on the securing functions of the
online voting system.

References

1. A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting


Experiment (SERVE)
D. Jefferson, A. Rubin, B. Simons, D. Wagner.
Web manuscript, 21 Jan 2004. Available: [Link]
February 2004.

10
2. Internet voting: concerns and solutions
Chuan-Kun Wu; Sankaranarayana, R.;
Cyber Worlds, 2002. Proceedings. First International Symposium on, 6-8
Nov.2002
Pages: 261 - 266

3. CyberVote consortium. D6V1, Report on Review of Cryptographic


Protocols and Security Techniques for Electronic Voting, January 28,
2002. Vol.1.
[Link]

4. Protecting the Internet from distributed denial-of-service attacks: a


proposal
Crocker, S.D.;
Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume: 92, Issue: 9, Sept. 2004
Pages: 1375 - 1381

5. Results of the Distributed-Systems Intruder Tools Workshop


CERT Coordination Center and other
[Link]
[Link] , Nov 1999.

6. Managing the Threat of Denial-of-Service Attacks v10.0


Allen House holder, Art Manion, Linda pesante, George M. Weaver,
CERT/CC
CERT Coordination Centre in collaboration with Rob Thomas
October 2001
[Link]/archive/pdf/Managing_DoS.pdf

7. Defeating distributed denial of service attacks,


Xianju Geng; Whinston, A.B.;
IT Professional , Volume: 2 , Issue: 4 , July-Aug. 2000
Pages:36 - 42

11

Common questions

Powered by AI

Complete confidence in internet voting systems remains challenging due to the inherent vulnerabilities of internet-based technologies, such as susceptibility to security threats like denial of service attacks, hacking, and malicious software . These risks pose significant threats to vote integrity and privacy, leading to skepticism about the system's reliability for large-scale elections . Despite advances in technology, such as improved encryption and authentication methods, these systems cannot yet match the perceived security of traditional voting methods .

DNS attacks compromise the integrity of internet voting systems by redirecting voters to fraudulent websites instead of legitimate voting portals, thereby intercepting or altering vote data . To mitigate such attacks, secure DNS configurations should be implemented, including DNSSEC protocols that validate the authenticity of DNS data. Regular monitoring and timely updates to DNS servers also help prevent unauthorized access and tampering . These measures ensure secure communication between voters and the authentic voting system .

Security experts argue against implementing internet voting systems in large organizations such as government elections due to critical security vulnerabilities, including denial of service attacks, data manipulation, and voter privacy breaches . These threats pose significant risks that could compromise the integrity of election outcomes. The inability to entirely secure the internet voting system or provide adequate defenses against sophisticated attacks leads experts to caution that such systems might not be suitable for high-stakes environments where election results impact entire populations .

The proposed measures to mitigate denial of service attacks include implementing secure routing protocols, using packet filters to detect attack patterns, upgrading host computers and networks with the latest security patches, and disabling unused network services . However, these measures are not entirely sufficient for effective prevention as they only reduce the risk rather than eliminate it. There is no comprehensive solution to completely prevent DoS attacks, and these measures serve as precautionary strategies to minimize potential damage .

Using internet voting for national elections faces significant feasibility challenges due to unresolved security risks such as denial of service attacks and potential data breaches. The complexity of securing such systems across diverse jurisdictions further complicates their deployment . Despite advancements in encryption and voter verification technologies, the lack of comprehensive solutions to prevent sophisticated cyber-attacks diminishes confidence in ensuring a fair and reliable election outcome . Current measures only offer partial mitigation, suggesting that internet voting systems are not yet ready for nationwide application in high-stakes elections .

A successful denial of service attack on internet voting day can prevent large numbers of voters from accessing the voting system, leading to uncast votes and potentially affecting the election outcome. For instance, if a web server is overloaded with junk data, legitimate voters may be unable to access the voting portal, similar to how spam emails consume mailbox space, causing important emails to be missed . This disruption is more damaging if it occurs on the last voting day when voter turnout is highest .

Authorization and authentication are critical in ensuring voter trust in internet voting systems. Authorization limits voting rights to eligible individuals, thereby preventing unauthorized access and vote fraud. It involves pre-election verification of voter eligibility, typically managed by a trusted authority . Authentication confirms the voter's identity at the time of voting, ensuring that votes are valid and cast by legitimate participants . Together, these processes ensure that only legitimate votes are counted, maintaining the integrity and trustworthiness of the election system .

Anonymity in internet voting systems is crucial for protecting voter privacy and ensuring that votes cannot be traced back to individuals. It ensures that voters' choices remain confidential, thus preventing any undue influence or coercion . However, anonymity can be compromised by security threats such as hacking or malware, which could expose voter identities or alter vote data. If there is a data breach, the link between the voter and their vote could be revealed, undermining the integrity of the election process .

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks pose a significant threat to internet voting systems by overloading servers with traffic, preventing legitimate users from accessing the system and casting their votes. Specific types include bandwidth consumption attacks, which flood the network to exhaust bandwidth; protocol attacks such as SYN floods, which overwhelm a system's capacity; and logical attacks like 'Ping of Death,' exploiting software vulnerabilities . These attacks can prevent access at critical times, potentially altering election outcomes .

The fundamental requirements for an internet voting system include authorization and authentication, mobility, flexibility, countability, and anonymity. Authorization ensures only eligible individuals can vote, and authentication validates votes during casting. Mobility enables voting from anywhere with internet access, while flexibility allows using various devices and networks. Countability ensures only valid votes are tallied, and anonymity ensures no link between a vote and the voter, maintaining secrecy and protecting voter privacy .

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