Do Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks Threaten Electronic Polling Stations? Scenarios and Recommendations
Researchers assess TEMPEST attacks on Brazil's electronic voting machines and recommend polling-station mitigations.
The paper examines whether electromagnetic side-channel, or TEMPEST, attacks can reconstruct screen content and threaten ballot secrecy on Brazil's electronic voting machine, the UEB. Attack scenarios draw on public information about the electoral system and a recent electoral-court case concerning an attempt to violate ballot secrecy. Software-defined radio experiments indicate that effectiveness depends strongly on weak oversight and public unawareness of the threat. The authors recommend awareness guidelines for voters, poll workers, and party representatives.
- Assesses TEMPEST reconstruction of video emanations from Brazil's UEB.
- Motivated by an electoral-court case on ballot-secrecy violations.
- SDR experiments tie effectiveness to weak polling-station oversight.
- Proposes awareness guidance for voters, workers, and party representatives.
Full article129 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
This paper investigates the threat to ballot secrecy in the Brazilian electronic voting machine (UEB) posed by electromagnetic side-channel attacks, also known as TEMPEST attacks. In these attacks, screen content can be reconstructed remotely by intercepting electromagnetic emanations associated with the target device's video signal. This work is motivated by a recent ruling by a Brazilian electoral court concerning an attempt to violate ballot secrecy using electronic equipment. Based on publicly available information about the electoral system, attack scenarios against polling stations are proposed. Experiments using software-defined radio show that the effectiveness of TEMPEST attacks strongly depends on the lack of oversight resulting from public unawareness of the threat. Finally, awareness guidelines are proposed for voters, poll workers, and party representatives to mitigate attack risks within a polling station.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28209