On the reliability of a voting system under cyber attacks

Voting systems have been widely used in many areas due to their technical decision making abilities. However, when a voting system operates on any internet platform, it faces a number of potential vulnerabilities including malware and denial of service attacks. In this work, we study the reliability of a majority voting system under cyber threats. Three multiple attack scenarios are considered including targeted, random, and dynamic attacks. We show that under some conditions, the reliability of a voting system decreases with the number of attacked voting components for the targeted attacks; however, for the random attacks, the reliability of a voting system can increase with the number of attacked voting components. For the dynamic attacks, it is discovered that the reliability of a voting system is significantly impacted by the attack rate and the random proposition time. We further develop efficient algorithms for computing the reliability of voting systems which can be employed in practice.