Preventing board flooding attacks in coercion-resistant electronic voting schemes

Abstract

This paper addresses the board flooding problem of Juels et al.'s coercion-resistant electronic voting scheme. A key property of this scheme is the possibility of casting invalid votes to the public board, which are indistinguishable from proper votes. Exactly this possibility is crucial for making the scheme coercion-resistant, but it also opens doors for flooding the board with an enormous amount of invalid votes, therefore spoiling the efficiency of the tallying process. To prevent such attacks, we present an adaption of the scheme in which each voter receives -in addition to the proper credential-some dummy credentials from the election registrars. Dummy credentials may be used to deceive possible coercers. The list of all dummy credentials is published along with the electoral register. Based on the electoral register and the list of dummy credentials, the system is now capable of making a distinction between invalid votes generated from dummy credentials and invalid votes generated from fake credentials. While the former are kept until the tallying phase, the latter are immediately rejected by the public board. If the public board additionally rejects all incoming duplicate votes, then its maximum size is bounded by the total number of issued credentials. This guarantees an efficient linear-time tallying phase even in case of a massive board flooding attack with a very large number of invalid votes. Although the solution presented in this paper does not yet entirely rule out vote selling or coercion, it makes it at least unbearable for the vast majority of voters. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.