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Internet Voting: Improving Resistance to Malicious Servers (PDF)

Ricardo Lebre
IST/INESC ID Lisboa

Rui Joaquim
DEETC/ISEL/INESC ID Lisboa

André Zúquete
DET/UA/IEETA

Paulo Ferreira
DEI/IST/INESC ID Lisboa

Keywords: Internet Voting, Blind Signatures, Digital Signatures, Denial-of-Service attacks

With the explosive growth and consequent usage of the Internet as a medium to offer new services with increased value, it became possible to develop Internet Voting Systems. So far, several have been proposed but few have been implemented. REVS is an Internet Voting System based on blind signatures designed to tackle some of the real-world problems presented by other systems. The main contribution of our work is to improve the robustness of REVS. This is achieved with a scheme that prevents specific denial of service attacks against protocol participants, which are not easily detected. In particular, we address the problem raised by colluded malicious servers preventing voters from voting and the exhaustion of resources on servers. Then, we present a performance comparison of the solutions proposed against the current REVS protocol.

IADIS International Conference Applied Computing 2004, pp. 44-52. Lisboa, Portugal, Mar 23-26, 2004.