International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We conduct a security analysis of the e-voting protocol used for the largest political election using e-voting in the world, the 2022 French legislative election for the citizens overseas. Due to a lack of system and threat model specifications, we built and contributed such specifications by studying the French legal framework and by reverse-engineering the code base accessible to the voters. Our analysis reveals that this protocol is affected by two design-level and implementation-level vulnerabilities. We show how those allow a standard voting server attacker and even more so a channel attacker to defeat the election integrity and ballot privacy due to 6 attack variants. We propose and discuss 5 fixes to prevent those attacks. Our specifications, the attacks, and the fixes were acknowledged by the relevant stakeholders during our responsible disclosure. Our attacks are in the process of being prevented with our fixes for future elections. Beyond this specific protocol, we draw general conclusions and lessons from this instructive experience where an e-voting protocol meets the real-world constraints of a large-scale and political election.

The SwissPost e-voting system is currently proposed under the scrutiny of the community, before being deployed in 2022 for political elections in several Swiss cantons. We explain how real world constraints led to shortcomings that allowed a privacy attack to be mounted. More precisely, dishonest authorities can learn the vote of several voters of their choice, without being detected, even when the requested threshold of honest authorities act as prescribed.