Question

Discuss how public key cryptography could be used for internet voting in local and national elections, include the pros and cons for trying to implement this type of solution from a technological and sociological perspective.

Answer 1

• We exploited the shell injection vulnerability to carry out several attacks that illustrate the devastating effects attackers could have during a real election if they gained a similar level of access. It modifies run to properly quote its arguments using single quotes.

• Stealing secrets We retrieved several cryptographic secrets from the application server, including the public key used for encrypting ballots.
• Despite the use of the term “public key,” this key should actually be kept secret, since it allows attackers to substitute arbitrary ballots in place of actual cast ballots should they gain access to the storage device.
• We also gained access to the database by finding credentials in the bash history file (mysql -h 10.1.143.75 -udvbm -pP@ssw0rd).
• Changing past and future votes We used the stolen public key to replace all of the encrypted ballot files on the server at the time of our intrusion with a forged ballot of our choosing.
• In addition, we modified the ballot-processing function to append any subsequently voted ballots to a .tar file in the publicly accessible images directory (where we could later retrieve them) and replace the originals with our forged ballot.
• Recovery from this attack is difficult; there is little hope for protecting future ballots from this level of compromise, since the code that processes the ballots is itself suspect.
• Using backups to ensure that compromises are not able to affect ballots cast prior to the compromise may conflict with ballot secrecy in the event that the backup itself is compromised.