The New South Wales iVote System: Security Failures and Verification Flaws in a Live Online Election

In the world's largest-ever deployment of online voting, the iVote Internet voting system was trusted for the return of 280,000 ballots in the 2015 state election in New South Wales, Australia. During the election, we performed an independent security analysis of parts of the live iVote system and uncovered severe vulnerabilities that could be leveraged to manipulate votes, violate ballot privacy, and subvert the verification mechanism. These vulnerabilities do not seem to have been detected by the election authorities before we disclosed them, despite a pre-election security review and despite the system having run in a live state election for five days. One vulnerability, the result of including analytics software from an insecure external server, exposed some votes to complete compromise of privacy and integrity. At least one parliamentary seat was decided by a margin much smaller than the number of votes taken while the system was vulnerable. We also found protocol flaws, including vote verification that was itself susceptible to manipulation. This incident underscores the difficulty of conducting secure elections online and carries lessons for voters, election officials, and the e-voting research community

Strength Analysis Modelling of Flexible Umbilical Members for Marine Structures

This paper presents a 3-dimensional finite element formulation for predicting the behaviour of complex umbilical cross-sections exposed to loading from tension, torque, internal and external pressure including bending. Helically wound armours and tubes are treated as thin and slender beams formulated within the framework of small strains but large displacements, applying the principle of virtual displacements to obtain finite element equations. Interaction between structural elements is handled by 2-and 3-noded contact elements based on a penalty parameter formulation. The model takes into account a number of features, such as material nonlinearity, gap and friction between individual bodies, and contact with external structures and with a full 3-dimensional description. Numerical studies are presented to validate the model against another model as well as test data

Cast-as-Intended Mechanism with Return Codes Based on PETs

We propose a method providing cast-as-intended verifiability for remote electronic voting. The method is based on plaintext equivalence tests (PETs), used to match the cast ballots against the pre-generated encrypted code tables. Our solution provides an attractive balance of security and functional properties. It is based on well-known cryptographic building blocks and relies on standard cryptographic assumptions, which allows for relatively simple security analysis. Our scheme is designed with a built-in fine-grained distributed trust mechanism based on threshold decryption. It, finally, imposes only very little additional computational burden on the voting platform, which is especially important when voters use devices of restricted computational power such as mobile phones. At the same time, the computational cost on the server side is very reasonable and scales well with the increasing ballot size

An example of proving UC-realization with formal methods

In the universal composability framework we consider ideal functionalities for secure messaging and signcryption. Using traditional formal methods techniques we show that the secure messaging functionality can be UC-realized by a hybrid protocol that uses the signcryption functionality and a public key infrastructure functionality. We also discuss that the signcryption functionality can be UC-realized by a secure signcryption scheme

Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

Additively Homomorphic IBE from Higher Residuosity

We present an identity-Based encryption (IBE) scheme that is group homomorphic for addition modulo a ``large\u27\u27 (i.e. superpolynomial) integer, the first such group homomorphic IBE. Our first result is the construction of an IBE scheme supporting homomorphic addition modulo a poly-sized prime $e$. Our construction builds upon the IBE scheme of Boneh, LaVigne and Sabin (BLS). BLS relies on a hash function that maps identities to $e$-th residues. However there is no known way to securely instantiate such a function. Our construction extends BLS so that it can use a hash function that can be securely instantiated. We prove our scheme IND-ID-CPA secure under the (slightly modified) $e$-th residuosity assumption in the random oracle model and show that it supports a (modular) additive homomorphism. By using multiple instances of the scheme with distinct primes and leveraging the Chinese Remainder Theorem, we can support homomorphic addition modulo a ``large\u27\u27 (i.e. superpolynomial) integer. We also show that our scheme for $e > 2$ is anonymous by additionally assuming the hardness of deciding solvability of a special system of multivariate polynomial equations. We provide a justification for this assumption by considering known attacks

On Online Banking Authentication for All: A Comparison of BankID Login Efficiency Using Smartphones Versus Code Generators

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Breaking the encryption scheme of the Moscow Internet voting system

This work is a merger of arXiv:1908.09170 and arXiv:1908.05127.International audienceIn September 2019, voters for the election at the Parliament of the city of Moscow were allowed to use an Internet voting system. The source code of it had been made available for public testing. In this paper we show two successful attacks on the encryption scheme implemented in the voting system. Both attacks were sent to the developers of the system, and both issues had been fixed after that.The encryption used in this system is a variant of ElGamal over finite fields. In the first attack we show that the used key sizes are too small. We explain how to retrieve the private keys from the public keys in a matter of minutes with easily available resources.When this issue had been fixed and the new system had become available for testing, we discovered that the new implementation was not semantically secure. We demonstrate how this newly found security vulnerability can be used for counting the number of votes cast for a candidate

Two-Pass Authenticated Key Exchange with Explicit Authentication and Tight Security

We propose a generic construction of 2-pass authenticated key exchange (AKE) scheme with explicit authentication from key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and signature (SIG) schemes. We improve the security model due to Gjosteen and Jager [Crypto2018] to a stronger one. In the strong model, if a replayed message is accepted by some user, the authentication of AKE is broken. We define a new security notion named \u27\u27IND-mCPA with adaptive reveals\u27\u27 for KEM. When the underlying KEM has such a security and SIG has unforgeability with adaptive corruptions, our construction of AKE equipped with counters as states is secure in the strong model, and stateless AKE without counter is secure in the traditional model. We also present a KEM possessing tight \u27\u27IND-mCPA security with adaptive reveals\u27\u27 from the Computation Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. When the generic construction of AKE is instantiated with the KEM and the available SIG by Gjosteen and Jager [Crypto2018], we obtain the first practical 2-pass AKE with tight security and explicit authentication. In addition, the integration of the tightly IND-mCCA secure KEM (derived from PKE by Han et al. [Crypto2019]) and the tightly secure SIG by Bader et al. [TCC2015] results in the first tightly secure 2-pass AKE with explicit authentication in the standard model

Swarms Search for Cancerous Lesions: Artificial Intelligence Use for Accurate Identification of Bone Metastasis on Bone Scans

International audienceIn 1994, Josh Benaloh proposed a probabilistic homomorphic encryption scheme, enhancing the poor expansion factor provided by Goldwasser and Micali's scheme. Since then, numerous papers have taken advantage of Benaloh's homomorphic encryption function, including voting schemes, private multi-party trust computation, non-interactive verifiable secret sharing, online poker. In this paper we show that the original description of the scheme is incorrect, because it can result in ambiguous decryption of ciphertexts. Then we show on several applications that a bad choice in the key generation phase of Benaloh's scheme has a real impact on the behaviour of the application. For instance in an e-voting protocol, it can inverse the result of an election. Our main contribution is a corrected description of the scheme (we provide a complete proof of correctness). Moreover we also compute the probability of failure of the original scheme. Finally we show how to formulate the security of the corrected scheme in a generic setting suitable for several homomorphic encryptions