Vulnerability
Common vulnerability in Online voting system are:
Denial-of-service attack against the voting process. If a client sends an HTTP request containing unexpected header fields, the server logs the field names to disk. By sending many specially crafted requests containing fields with very long names, an attacker can exhaust the server’s log storage, after which it will fail to accept any new votes. Curiously, the vulnerable code is only a few lines from the comment, “Don’t write to disk; we don’t know how large the value is.” This indicates that the developers were aware of similar attacks but failed to account for all variants.
A second problem we discovered is a shell-injection vulnerability in a server-side user interface that is intended to allow operators to perform pre-determined administrative tasks. The vulnerability would allow such an operator to execute arbitrary shell commands on the election servers with root privileges. Under current procedures, this is moot, since the same workers perform other administrative tasks at the command line as root.
Reliability of a software or hardware device. There is still a problem in software and device, meaning if used several times sometimes still an error (error) in the calculation of the number of votes. Neither in terms of hardware, such as equipment/devices are sometimes not able to respond quickly.
Human factors problems such as election officials, election officials sometimes do not understand its right to operate the device technology used in elections. And next is the factor that the voters itself has not been teach, voters doesn’t know of their own constituencies or have never done the selection by using e-voting technology that goes wrong in the run, resulting in many failures in performing the intended candidate selection.
Threat:
Internet voting systems pose numerous security threats the most significant of which have to do with vulnerabilities of the PC platform and vulnerabilities associated with the Internet itself. Client PCs could be located in voters’ homes or in public or commercial establishments such as libraries or cyber cafes. Assuring that all possible PCs are free of malware is not practically possible.
| Threat |
Consequence |
Likelihood |
Countermeasures |
| Denial of Service |
Disenfranchise-ment |
Common, occurred during Internet election |
No simple countermeasures |
| Trojan horse spyware to change or monitor votes |
Vote theft, loss of privacy |
Widely available tools for this |
Detection difficult. Individual PCs can be protected, but assuring compliance difficult, especially for public PCs. |
| Automated vote buying |
Compromise of election |
Likely since there exist organizations set up to do this |
None. Organizations may exist outside country’s jurisdiction |
| Insider attack on voting system |
Compromise of election |
Insider attacks are common in commercial settings. |
Separation of duties, adequate documentation, control over physical assets, independent audits, |
| Virus specific to Internet voting system |
Vote theft, privacy loss, disenfranchisement, compromise of election |
Unknown |
Very difficult since such a virus would have no prior history |
| Spoofing |
Vote theft, |
Common and easy |
Can be launched from anywhere. Made difficult by use of encrypted PIN |
Table1: Different types of Threats in Online voting system
Attacks:
Denial of Service Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that are carried out have devastating consequences and in most cases the extremely affect the ability to provide availability to a system. The following two methods described are how a hacker may compromise the availability to a voting system.
a. Ping of Death The ping of death relies on a flaw in some Transmission Control Protocol, Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack implementations. The attack relates to the handling of unusually and illegally large ping packets. Remote systems receiving such packets can crash as the memory allocated for storing packets overflows. The attack does not affect all systems in the same way, some systems will crash, and others will remain unaffected.
b. Packet Flooding Packet flooding exploits the fact that establishing a connection with the TCP protocol involves a three phase handshake between the systems. In a packet flooding attack, an attacking host sends many packets and does not respond with an acknowledgment to the receiving host. As the receiving host is waiting for more and more acknowledgments, the buffer queue will fill up. Ultimately, the receiving machine can no longer accept legitimate connections
A computer virus is a computer program that can reproduce itself and may cause undesired effects in computers where it is active. To do its malicious work, the virus needs executing. Usually viruses are located together with other code that is likely, will be executed by a user. As long as the virus is active on the computer, it can copy itself to other files or disks when they are used. Viruses made could destroy E-voting systems. This could compromise the availability at election time forcing governments and institutions to perform re-elections.
A worm is a type of virus that does not change any existing program or file to spread itself. Instead, it makes copies of itself within an infected computer and spreads to become active on other systems. It is intentionally destructive, overwriting portions of the files with random data. This damage is non-repairable, so files may need reinstallation or restoring from a backup. Worms could overwrite files and change results of votes if programmed to do so, bringing the integrity of the votes into question.
Trojan Horses Trojan horses are pieces of computer code that download to a computer while connected to the internet. They may be harmless, but it could possibly delete or modify an important file from the computer, plant a harmful virus, or even steal user's passwords. This makes all sorts of fraudulent schemes possible. Once inside a computer the Trojan horse can access passwords, screen names and other personal information and then distribute this confidential data to the attacker. Trojan horse represents an immense threat to systems confidentially and integrity of information of E-voting systems.
Numerous physical attacks can be carried out on E-voting system to sabotage an election. Vandalism of E-voting systems would make them inoperable for the day of the election. Saboteur's could remove network connections and pull plugs out of E-voting systems causing votes to be lost. Attackers may remove hard drives or smart cards replacing them with falsified data. E-voting machines could be stolen with attackers discovering sensitive voting information about users.
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