Arvind Kejriwal and team showed in Delhi Assembly on Tuesday how an EVM prototype machine can be hacked. It all looked nice on TV. However, it’s not that easy to hack thousands of machines across polling stations in favour of a single party. Candidates of any party do not get the same slot in EVM machines across seats so it is humanly very tedious to hack in a populous country like ours.
The ECI-EVMs use some of the most sophisticated technological features like one time programmable (OTP) microcontrollers, dynamic coding of key codes, date and time stamping of each and every key press, advanced encryption technology and EVM-tracking software to handle EVM logistics, among others to make the machine 100% tamper proof.
In what is the latest chapter in the tale of EVM hacks, a US-based Indian cybersecurity expert, Syed Shuja, has alleged that political parties, with the help of the Election Commission of India.
In the video above, we demonstrate two kinds of attacks against a real Indian EVM. One attack involves replacing a small part of the machine with a look-alike component that can be silently instructed to steal a percentage of the votes in favour of a chosen candidate. These instructions can be sent wirelessly from a mobile phone. Another attack uses a pocket-sized device to change the votes.
The second and the most deadly way to hack Indian EVMs is by inserting a chip with Trojan inside the display section of the Control unit. This requires access to the EVM for just two minutes and these replacement units can be made for a few hundred rupees. Bypassing completely all inbuilt securities, this chip would manipulate the results and give out “fixed” results on the EVM screen. The.
So one EVM machine can hold votes for one booth (around 1200 votes) and the lifetime of one EVM is 10 years. In 10 years, if a machine is used for five elections, two national and three state.
Indian EVM manufacturer Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has denied that it has been invited to participate in a challenge to hack EVMs in Botswana. BEL clarified that it did not sell any EVMs to.
ECI Voting Equipments. Electronic Voting Machine (also known as EVM) is voting using electronic means to either aid or take care of the chores of casting and counting votes. An EVM is designed with two units: the control unit and the balloting unit. These units are joined together by a cable. The control unit of the EVM is kept with the presiding officer or the polling officer.