[ISN] Researcher Arrested in India After Disclosing Problems With Voting Machines

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 02:53:09 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/researcher-arrested-in-india

By Kim Zetter 
Threat Level
Wired.com
August 23, 2010

A security researcher in India has been arrested after he refused to 
provide authorities with the name of a person who supplied him with an 
electronic voting machine that was used to discover vulnerabilities in 
the system. The researcher had used the machine to demonstrate how 
someone could hack voting systems to easily subvert an election.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, nearly a dozen police converged on the home of 
Hari Prasad, managing director of Netindia, to question him about the 
source of the voting machine he received. After refusing to identify his 
source, he was reportedly arrested under suspicion of theft and 
receiving stolen property.

The voting system was allegedly taken from a storage facility at the 
district election office in Mumbai. It was reported missing on May 12, 
after Prasad disclosed on a television program in India that he had 
received a machine from an anonymous source. It’s not clear why it took 
authorities so long to act on the report, but the arrest comes about a 
week after two representatives of the India Election Commission got into 
a heated debate about the country’s machines, during a panel discussion 
at an electronic voting conference (.mp3) in Washington, D.C.

Following that discussion, 28 computer security researchers signed a 
letter to India’s election commission (.pdf) stating that the country’s 
voting machines “do not today provide security, verifiability, or 
transparency adequate for confidence in election results.”

[...]


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Received on Tue Aug 24 2010 - 00:53:09 PDT

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