Protecting a Distributed Voting Schema for Anonymous and Secure Voting Against Attacks of Malicious Partners

A distributed protocol is presented for anonymous and secure voting that is failure-tolerant with respect to malicious behavior of individual participants and that does not rely on a trusted third party. The proposed voting protocol was designed to be executed on a fixed group of N known participants, each of them casting one vote that may be a vote for abstention. Several attack vectors on the protocol are presented, and the detection of malicious behavior like spying, suppressing, inventing, and modifying protocol messages or votes by the protocol is shown. If some participants stop the protocol, a fair information exchange is achieved in the sense that either all votes are guaranteed to be valid and accessible to all participants, or malicious behavior has been detected and the protocol is stopped, but the votes are not disclosed.