Attacking and fixing Helios: An analysis of ballot secrecy

This paper presents attacks against the Helios electronic voting protocol that violate ballot secrecy.

Véronique Cortier & Ben Smyth (2011) Attacking and fixing Helios: An analysis of ballot secrecy. In CSF'11: 24th Computer Security Foundations Symposium, 297–311, IEEE Computer Society.

Abstract

Helios 2.0 is an open-source web-based end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system, suitable for use in low-coercion environments. In this paper, we analyse ballot secrecy and discover a vulnerability which allows an adversary to compromise the privacy of voters. This vulnerability has been successfully exploited to break privacy in a mock election using the current Helios implementation. Moreover, the feasibility of an attack is considered in the context of French legislative elections and, based upon our findings, we believe it constitutes a real threat to ballot secrecy in such settings. Finally, we present a fix and show that our solution satisfies a formal definition of ballot secrecy using the applied pi calculus.

Video demonstration

A video demonstrating this attack is available on YouTube.

$ curl -s https://publications.bensmyth.com/files/Smyth11-attacking-ballot-secrecy-in-Helios.bib | cat
@inproceedings{Smyth11-attacking-ballot-secrecy-in-Helios,
  title = {{Attacking and fixing Helios:}}
        # {{ An analysis of ballot secrecy}},
  year = {2011}, author = {Véronique Cortier and Ben Smyth}, doi = {10.1109/CSF.2011.27},
  url = {./},
  url-pdf = {./files/attacking-Helios.IEEE.pdf},
  url-bib = {./files/attacking-ballot-secrecy-in-Helios.bib},
  url-yaml = {./files/attacking-ballot-secrecy-in-Helios.yml},
  url-md = {./files/attacking-Helios.IEEE.md}
}