How Efficient Are Replay Attacks against Vote Privacy? A Formal Quantitative Analysis

[en] Replay attacks are among the most well-known attacks against vote privacy. Many e-voting systems have been proven vulnerable to replay attacks, including systems like Helios that are used in real practical elections. Despite their popularity, it is commonly believed that replay attacks are inefficient but the actual threat that they pose to vote privacy has never been studied formally. Therefore, in this paper, we precisely analyze for the first time how efficient replay attacks really are. We study this question from commonly used and complementary perspectives on vote privacy, showing as an independent contribution that a simple extension of a popular game-based privacy definition corresponds to a strong entropy-based notion. Our results demonstrate that replay attacks can be devastating for a voter's privacy even when an adversary's resources are very limited. We illustrate our formal findings by applying them to a number of real-world elections, showing that a modest number of replays can result in significant privacy loss. Overall, our work reveals that, contrary to a common belief, replay attacks can be very efficient and must therefore be considered a serious threat.

Research center :

- Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) > APSIA - Applied Security and Information Assurance

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

MESTEL, David ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > APSIA

MUELLER, Johannes ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > APSIA

Reisert, Pascal

External co-authors :

yes

Language :

English

Title :

How Efficient Are Replay Attacks against Vote Privacy? A Formal Quantitative Analysis

Publication date :

2023

Journal title :

Journal of Computer Security

ISSN :

0926-227X

Publisher :

IOS Press, Netherlands

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Focus Area :

Security, Reliability and Trust

FnR Project :

FNR14698166 - Future-proofing Privacy In Secure Electronic Voting, 2020 (01/01/2021-31/12/2023) - Johannes Mueller

Available on ORBilu :

since 09 July 2023

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