Ballot stuffing in a postal voting system

Author

Cortier, Véronique ; Detrey, Jérémie ; Gaudry, Pierrick ; Sur, Frédéric ; Thomé, Emmanuel ; Turuani, Mathieu ; Zimmermann, Paul

fYear

2011

fDate

29-29 Aug. 2011

Firstpage

27

Lastpage

36

Abstract

We review a postal voting system used in spring 2011 by the French research institute CNRS and designed by a French company (Tagg Informatique). We explain how the structure of the material can be easily understood out of a few samples of voting material (distributed to the voters), without any prior knowledge of the system. Taking advantage of some flaws in the design of the system, we show how to perform major ballot stuffing, making possible to change the outcome of the election. Our attack has been tested and confirmed by the CNRS. A fixed postal voting system has been quickly proposed by Tagg Informatique in collaboration with the CNRS, preventing this attack for the next elections.

Keywords

government data processing; security of data; CNRS research institute; France; Tagg Informatique company; ballot stuffing; postal voting system; voting material; Companies; Electronic voting; Equations; Materials; Nominations and elections; Privacy; Security;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Requirements Engineering for Electronic Voting Systems (REVOTE), 2011 International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Trento

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0951-7

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4577-0953-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/REVOTE.2011.6045913

Filename

6045913