Researchers hacked India’s Electronic Voting Machine!

India, the world’s largest democracy, votes entirely on government-made Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) that authorities claim are ‘tamperproof,’ but last week security researchers proved that they can be manipulated to steal elections. A team led by Hari Prasad, Professor J. Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp released an awesome video that shows off hardware hacks they built, Slashdot reports.

fter connecting a home-made device to a voting machine, University of Michigan researchers were able to change results by sending text messages from a mobile. “We made an imitation display board that looks almost exactly like the real display in the machines. But underneath some of the components of the board, we hide a microprocessor and a Bluetooth radio,” Prof. J Alex Halderman, who led the project, told the BBC. He also added, “Our lookalike display board intercepts the vote totals that the machine is trying to display and replaces them with dishonest totals – basically whatever the bad guy wants to show up at the end of the election.”

However, India’s Deputy Election Commissioner, Alok Shukla, said, “It is not just the machine, but the overall administrative safeguards which we use that make it absolutely impossible for anybody to open the machine. India uses about 1.4m electronic voting machines in each general election. “Before the elections take place, the machine is set in the presence of the candidates and their representatives. These people are allowed to put their seal on the machine, and nobody can open the machine without breaking the seals.”

Here is the video how the researchers hacked the EVM hardware