If you are going to run an election online you need to protect yourself against distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). You can hire a cloud-based service to provide DDoS protection, but how much trust are you placing in them?

As it turns out, probably more than most people realize, and potentially more than is appropriate for an election.

In this paper we examine the trust implications of DDoS protection in the context of the 2017 state election of Western Australia and their use of the iVote online voting platform.

Key Findings

Presentation Video

Youtube version of the talk from E-Vote-ID in Bregenz Austria

Technical Paper

Trust Implications of DDoS Protection in Online Elections
Chris Culnane, Mark Eldridge, Aleksander Essex, and Vanessa Teague
Electronic Voting: Second International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID, 2017.
[ Citation ]

Other Articles

Read more about this work in The Register and Pursuit.