Voting Systems with Trust Mechanisms in Cyberspace: Vulnerabilities and Defenses

—With the popularity of voting systems in cyberspace, there are growing evidence that the current voting systems can be manipulated by fake votes. This problem has attracted many researchers working on guarding the voting systems against collaborative malicious voters. The current research mainly focuses on two areas: relieving the effect of dishonest votes by evaluating the trust of voters, and limiting the resources that can be used by the attackers, such as the number of voters and the number of votes. In this paper, we argue that powering voting systems with trust and limiting attack resources are not enough. We present a novel attack named as RepTrap. Our case study and experiments show that this new attack needs much less resources to manipulate the voting systems and has a much higher success rate compared with existing attacks. We further identify the reasons behind this attack and propose two defense schemes accordingly. In the first scheme, we hide the correlation knowledg...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TKDE
• Authors: Qinyuan Feng, Yan Lindsay Sun, Ling Liu, Yafei Yang, Yafei Dai
• Keywords: Collaborative Malicious Voters, Success Rate, TKDE 2010, Voting Systems