Hari Prasad, a technocrat who was arrested recently for stealing electronic voting machines and released yesterday, will present a controversial paper on how EVMs used in Indian elections can be tampered with at a conference on computer and communication safety.The conference in Chicago in October will be co-sponsored by IT majors like Google and Microsoft, reports Hindustan Times.
Read the whole article:
Hari Prasad, who was arrested last week for stealing electronic voting machines and released on Saturday, will present a controversial paper on how EVMs used in Indian elections can be tampered with at a conference on computer and communication safety. The paper — Security Analysis of India’s
Electronic Voting Machines — is based on the first unauthorised analysis of an Election Commission EVM and co-authored by Alex Halderman of University of Michigan and Rop Gonggrijp, a technology expert instrumental in getting EVMs banned in Holland in 1993.
The conference in Chicago in October will be co-sponsored by IT majors like Google and Microsoft.
The paper shows how EVMs can be tampered with either by insiders or by using portable hardware devices, including mobile phones, to extract and alter vote records stored in the machine. This, the paper claims, can be done either by replacing the chips or inserting an additional one when the machines are being shifted. The replaced chips can escape the security test of election officers.
“It is just a possibility,” Halderman told HT. “Our study does not show that any election has ever been stolen by tampering with EVMs… nobody can reasonably claim, based solely on the results we have presented, that an election now settled should be overturned.”
The first doubts were raised by BJP leader L.K. Advani, who suggested that the country revert to ballot voting. He got support from parties including the CPM, RJD, AIADMK and TDP, who also met election commissioners. The Congress said the EC had the final authority over the mode of voting.
The EC was quick to rebuff the claims in the paper. “The demonstration has not shown any tamperability in the EVM. The EVM cannot be tampered with by any method shown in the demonstration,” K.N. Bhar, a commission secretary, told Hari Prasad, in a letter dated August 7. “It is not possible to replace any equipment in the EVM in the election scenario.”
PV. Indiresan former IIT director and member of both the committees, said the EVMs were examined by independent computer experts and tested for security.
Showing posts with label EVM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EVM. Show all posts
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Election commission refutes claims by US academic of EVM vulnerability
A representative of the Election Commission of India, Alok Shukla and an American university professor, Alex Halderman clashed publicly over contradictory claims regarding the machines at an industry conference on Electronic Voting Machines. Halderman said that Electronic Voting Machines are vulnerable to tampering, when Alok Shukla denied it, reports The Hindu.
Read the whole article on Miracle Of Democracy.
This week the debate on whether electronic voting machines in India are tamper-proof reached boiling point in faraway Washington, as a representative of the Election Commission of India and an American university professor clashed publicly over contradictory claims regarding the machines.
Mr. Halderman, who said that he and his colleagues had worked with Mr. Prasad to demonstrate the vulnerability of EVMs to tampering, pleaded with Mr. Shukla to call off efforts by the ECI to have the Indian police question Mr. Prasad.
Mr. Shukla, however, pointed out that if the Indian police had sought out Mr. Prasad after his television appearance it was because he was known to have government property in his possession and that such unauthorised access to EVMs could have serious consequences for election results themselves.
The technical arguments surrounding the question of the vulnerability of EVMs to tampering were also in stark contradiction.
On the one hand Mr. Shukla, along with P.V. Indiresan, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, argued that “Indian EVMs are fully tamper-proof when used under complete administrative safeguards prescribed by the ECI. There is no justification in the demand for a change in the voting system.”
Yet Mr. Halderman noted that based on the experiments that he and his colleagues had undertaken they could demonstrate that EVMs were vulnerable firstly to the so-called “dishonest display” attack whereby a microcontroller and a Bluetooth radio chip could be smuggled into the device using a genuine-looking display board.
Mr. Halderman alleged that the Indian EVM was also susceptible to attack through the use of an electronic clip, which attached directly to the EVM chips and could rewrite the votes stored there. Not only could the votes be changed through this “electronic form of booth capture,” but the secrecy of election data could also be violated as the clip would allow the attacker to copy out the votes stored.
He said the paper, wax and string seals used to protect EVMs had been “widely discredited” and were entirely vulnerable to tampering. “Machines [are] stored around the country in a variety of locations, from abandoned warehouses to schools, etc. [and it is] likely many of them could be accessed by criminals, especially with the aid of dishonest insiders,” he said.
However Mr. Shukla and Mr. Indiresan denied these claims.
Read the whole article on Miracle Of Democracy.
This week the debate on whether electronic voting machines in India are tamper-proof reached boiling point in faraway Washington, as a representative of the Election Commission of India and an American university professor clashed publicly over contradictory claims regarding the machines.
Mr. Halderman, who said that he and his colleagues had worked with Mr. Prasad to demonstrate the vulnerability of EVMs to tampering, pleaded with Mr. Shukla to call off efforts by the ECI to have the Indian police question Mr. Prasad.
Mr. Shukla, however, pointed out that if the Indian police had sought out Mr. Prasad after his television appearance it was because he was known to have government property in his possession and that such unauthorised access to EVMs could have serious consequences for election results themselves.
The technical arguments surrounding the question of the vulnerability of EVMs to tampering were also in stark contradiction.
On the one hand Mr. Shukla, along with P.V. Indiresan, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, argued that “Indian EVMs are fully tamper-proof when used under complete administrative safeguards prescribed by the ECI. There is no justification in the demand for a change in the voting system.”
Yet Mr. Halderman noted that based on the experiments that he and his colleagues had undertaken they could demonstrate that EVMs were vulnerable firstly to the so-called “dishonest display” attack whereby a microcontroller and a Bluetooth radio chip could be smuggled into the device using a genuine-looking display board.
Mr. Halderman alleged that the Indian EVM was also susceptible to attack through the use of an electronic clip, which attached directly to the EVM chips and could rewrite the votes stored there. Not only could the votes be changed through this “electronic form of booth capture,” but the secrecy of election data could also be violated as the clip would allow the attacker to copy out the votes stored.
He said the paper, wax and string seals used to protect EVMs had been “widely discredited” and were entirely vulnerable to tampering. “Machines [are] stored around the country in a variety of locations, from abandoned warehouses to schools, etc. [and it is] likely many of them could be accessed by criminals, especially with the aid of dishonest insiders,” he said.
However Mr. Shukla and Mr. Indiresan denied these claims.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
ECI to give demo on EVM, hopes to remove doubts about tampering
The Election Commission of India has invited citizens to a programme called ‘Verifiability, Transparency & Accountability in Elections', to see a demonstration by NetIndia which has claimed that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with. NetIndia was asked to prove their claims, reports The Times of India.
Read the whole article on Miracle Of Democracy.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has invited citizens to a programme called ‘Verifiability, Transparency & Accountability in Elections' (Veta), to see a demonstration by NetIndia which has claimed that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with. The ECI said that the demonstration should be given under actual conditions in which EVMs are used.
The commission has asked NetIndia to come to the ECI at New Delhi at 3 pm on Tuesday and prove their claims.
The NetIndia, which was associated with Veta, on several occasions had in the past demonstrated how an EVM can be tampered.
Read the whole article on Miracle Of Democracy.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has invited citizens to a programme called ‘Verifiability, Transparency & Accountability in Elections' (Veta), to see a demonstration by NetIndia which has claimed that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with. The ECI said that the demonstration should be given under actual conditions in which EVMs are used.
The commission has asked NetIndia to come to the ECI at New Delhi at 3 pm on Tuesday and prove their claims.
The NetIndia, which was associated with Veta, on several occasions had in the past demonstrated how an EVM can be tampered.
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