Security Attacks on E-Voting System Using Blockchain

Abstract

Electronic voting has become popular in democratic countries, and thus the cyber security of this system is demanded. In this paper, some attacks were made on a proposed electronic election model based on blockchain technology, where the impact of each attack (Sybil, DDoS, Eclipse, Selfish mining, 51% attack) was calculated, and the time in which it achieved 51% of the attack was calculated. In this study, we investigate of Blockchain technology’s attack surface, focusing on general blockchains. The following factors show how these attacks have an impact on the proposed model: 1) The cryptographic architecture of the Blockchain. 2) The distributed architecture of systems using Blockchain. 3) The Blockchain application context. For each of these factors, we identify several attacks, including selfish mining, 51% attack, sybil attacks, eclipse attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks, consensus delay (due to selfish behavior or distributed denial-of-service attacks), blockchain forks, orphan blocks, block swallowing, wallet theft, smart contract attacks, and privacy attacks.