Secrecy forever? Analysis of anonymity in Internet-based voting protocols

Internet-based elections have become more and more popular. In future a lot of people are probably going to cast their ballot over the Internet. This could be a great benefit. But at the same time new possibilities to manipulate the election will arise: Besides other network specific attacks, sniffing of the network traffic becomes interesting. This paper identifies the problems with respect to temporal unlimited election secrecy against sniffing on the network. The problem is the voter´s IP address and the fact that in practice, there is no anonymous communication channel. Thus the voter´s anonymity can be broken in future. However, the attacker will not be able to proof his knowledge about the voter´s decision. We figure out how this vulnerability is prevented with state of the art technologies.