Formal analysis of attacks for e-voting system

Abstract

Recently, the use of formal methods to specify and verify properties of electronic voting (e-voting) systems, with particular interest in security, verifiability, and anonymity, is getting much attention. Formal specification and verification of such systems can greatly help to better understand the system requirements by thoroughly specifying and analyzing the underlying assumptions and security specific properties. Unfortunately, even though these systems have been formally verified to satisfy the desired system security requirements, they are still vulnerable to attack.In this paper we extend a formal specification of the ES&S voting system by specifying attacks that have been shown to successfully compromise the system. We believe that performing such analysis is important for two reasons: first, it allows us to discover some missing critical requirements for the specification and/or assumptions that were not met. Second, it allows us to derive mitigation or counter-measure strategies when the system behaves differently than it should. We used the ASTRAL language for the specification, and the verification is performed using the PVS tool.

Procedural security analysis: A methodological approach

“…Existing works in this area present formal specification and verification of an e-voting system at different level of abstractions. In this area the work closest in sprit to ours can be grouped in two closely related directions: verifying cryptographic protocols (e.g., Kremer and Ryan (2005), Delaune et al (2009), Cansell et al (2007, Sampigethaya and Poovendran (2006) and Backes et al (2008)) and verifying system behavior (e.g., Tiella et al (2006), Weldemariam et al (2009b), Sturton et al (2009) and Weldemariam et al (2010)). Some of these works selectively apply formal modeling techniques where these techniques add rigor to the development or help assessing an e-voting systems.…”

Privacy-by-design based on quantitative threat modeling

“…Finally, although not directly related with PbD for the sake of completeness are worth to mention approaches solely focused on either (i) quantitative threat modeling (e.g., in TMAP [19] which quantifies threats related with Commercial Off The Shelf systems -COTS -), (ii) security requirements elicitation methodologies based on risk analysis (e.g., CORAS [14], OCTAVE [20] and ISRAM [21] although they are not embedded into a TMM and -except for ISRAM -do not consider the quantitative aggregation of risks), (iii) rigorous methods for analyzing security specifications (e.g., Weldemariam and Villafiorita [22], [23] where model checking is used to derive security attacks in a e-voting scenario) and, (iv) qualitative methods to elicit security requirements (e.g., DESEREC [24]). …”