Trust implications of DDoS protection in online elections

Abstract

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Online elections make a natural target for distributed denial of service attacks. Election agencies wary of disruptions to voting may procure DDoS protection services from a cloud provider. However, current DDoS detection and mitigation methods come at the cost of significantly increased trust in the cloud provider. In this paper we examine the security implications of denial-of-service prevention in the context of the 2017 state election in Western Australia, revealing a complex interaction between actors and infrastructure extending far beyond its borders. Based on the publicly observable properties of this deployment, we outline several attack..