Communications of the ACM
Researchers Find Critical Backdoor in Swiss Online Voting System
Researchers warn of a critical backdoor flaw in Switzerland's new Internet voting system.
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An international research team warned of a critical backdoor flaw in Switzerland's new Internet voting system.
The flaw exists in a part of the system for confirming all of the ballots and votes counted in an election are the same ones that voters cast; exploiters could swap out all of the legitimate ballots for fraudulent ones, evading detection.
Voters authenticate themselves to the voting website using their birthdate and an initialization code they receive from the Swiss national postal service. After voters make their selections on screen, the votes are encrypted and sent to Swiss Post servers, where they are processed through a "mix network" that cryptographically shuffles the votes to ensure they cannot be matched to the voter, before decrypting and counting them.
The flaw is in the zero-knowledge proof, used to demonstrate that ballots have not been swapped out during shuffling.
Given its seriousness, the researchers said the voting system's rollout should be halted.
From Motherboard
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