EVM Hacking demonstration

Why in news?

In Delhi Assembly on May 9^th, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAM) legislator used an electronic voting machine (EVM) prototype to highlight a possible hacking of the actual EVM used by the Election Commission of India (ECI).

What are arguments of the demonstrators?

• It registered votes for candidates and allowed for the ballot unit to display total votes polled by each candidates checked at the end of polling.
• It also demonstrated that the use of malicious code by a voter affiliated to a certain party could fix the results to be different from the actual tally and in favour of that party and, demonstrated that the machine could be hacked.
• It indicated that this is how EVMs are being hacked in the country and that it is easily possible to do the same with the ECI’s EVMs.
• The ECI as an authority is in charge of only certain aspects of safekeeping and monitoring of EVMs and that many others such as procurement of microcontrollers from abroad, calibration of machines are done externally.
• It is in these stages that the manipulation can be done beforehand.

What is the real scenario?

• In reality, the ECI’s EVM does not allow for any Trojan horse (malicious code) enabled key presses.
• Only one key press on the ballot unit is allowed during the act of voting and recognised by the control unit, so the use of a secret code to lock the tally in favour of a party as alleged by the demonstration does not hold true in the case of the ECI’s EVM.
• For the demonstrated things to happen, a large-scale operation of changing the microcontroller embedded in every EVM to be used in an election is required.
• This is only possible if there is direct collusion between the ECI authorities who are in charge of storage, commissioning and allocation.
• Quality control checks are done during and after manufacture of EVM’s.
• The ECI's new models (M2 and M3) prevent tamper-proofing by time-stamping key presses and provide for encryptions and tracking software that handle EVM logistics.

What is the way forward?

• EVM-hacking demonstration did not raise any relevant questions about the technical and procedural safeguards that are already in place and set by the ECI.
• The EVM needs to constantly evolve in order to remain secure and workable under any condition while at the same time keeping its operations simple.
• The answers to the present stability in the AAP’s electoral growth lie in the application of its politics and not in technology.
• The solution to the AAP’s problems lies in politics, not wild accusations about EVMs.

Source: The Hindu