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EVMs Are Tamper-proof - EC; No, Say Scientists|
- By CXOtoday Staff, Aug 14, 2009 1748 hrs IST
- Tags : Election Commission Navin Chawla, electronic voting machines, EVMs, parliamentary elections, Maharashtra Assembly polls, Hovav Shacham
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Election Commission Navin Chawla on Thursday said that the effectiveness of the new electronic voting machines (EVMs), used during the parliamentary elections, has been proved beyond doubt and they would be used during the forthcoming Maharashtra Assembly polls.
Reacting to demands from some sections of political parties to provide paper backup for the machines during the Assembly polls, Chawla said that the EVMs were tamper-proof and that no paper back-up would be provided.
"Nobody has been able to demonstrate that the machines can be tampered with," the EC said, adding that the political parties were invited to tamper with 100 EVMs, selected randomly from across the country. They were unwilling or unable to do so, Chawla said.
Providing paper back-up will compromise the secrecy of the ballot, he added.
The new voting machines have been manufactured by the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Limited and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), Bangalore.
Chawla, along with Election Commissioners SY Quraishi and VS Sampath, is in town to review the state's preparedness for the Assembly election.
However, a team of computer scientists recently demonstrated how an electronic voting machine could be hacked and 'steal' the votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed.
The scientists from the Universites of California, San Diego, Michigan and Princeton employed 'return-oriented programming' to force an voting machine to turn against itself.
'Voting machines must remain secure throughout their entire service lifetime, and this study demonstrates how a relatively new programming technique can be used to take control of a voting machine that was designed to resist takeover, but that did not anticipate this new kind of malicious programming,' said Hovav Shacham, one of the scientists.
The study demonstrates that return-oriented programming can be used to execute vote-stealing computations by taking control of an EVM designed to prevent code injection.
The scientists had no access to the machine's source code - or any other proprietary information - when designing the demonstration attack.
It looks like paper-based elections are the way to go. Probably, the best approach would involve fast optical scanners reading paper ballots. These kinds of paper-based systems are amenable to statistical audits, which is something the election security research community is shifting to, said Shacham.
If you are using electronic voting machines, you need to have a separate paper record at the very least, he added.
Related Links
Smarter EVMs to Debut in Lok Sabha Elections 2009
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