Clash attacks and the STAR-vote system

Abstract

STAR-Vote is an end-to-end cryptographic voting system that produces both plaintext paper ballots and encrypted electronic records of each ballot. We describe how clash attacks against STAR-Vote could weaken its security guarantees: corrupt voting terminals could identify voters with identical ballot preferences and print identical receipts for them, while generating electronic ballot ciphertexts for other candidates. Each voter would then be able to “verify” their ballot on the public bulletin board, but the electronic tally would include alternative ciphertexts corresponding to the duplicate voters. We describe how this threat can be exploited and mitigated with existing STAR-Vote mechanisms, including STAR-Vote’s use of Benaloh challenges and a cryptographic hash chain. We also describe how this threat can be mitigated through statistical sampling of the printed paper ballots as an extension to the risk-limiting audits that STAR-Vote already requires.