Indian Election Officials Challenges Critics To Hack Electronic Voting Machine (thehindu.com)

Slashdot reader erodep writes: Following the recent elections in India, there have been multiple allegations of electoral fraud by hacking of Electronic Voting Machines... Two weeks ago, a party even "demonstrated" that these machines can be hacked. The Election Commission of India has rubbished these claims and they have thrown an open challenge, starting June 3rd to hack these EVMs using WiFi, Bluetooth or any internet device. This is a plea to the hackers of Slashdot to help secure the future of the largest democracy on the planet.
Each party can nominate three experts -- though India's Aam Aaadmi Party is already complaining that there's too many terms and conditions. And party leader Sanjay Singh has said he also wants paper ballots for all future elections, arguing "All foreign countries like America, Japan, Germany and Britain have gone back to ballot paper."

Comments

Re:How to embarrass your country in one easy step

[ShanghaiBill]

The challenge is meaningless. It is far easier to install a backdoor than to detect one. Heartbleed went undetected for years, and that was an unintentional bug with full source available to anyone. A maliciously designed backdoor, specifically designed to be hidden, would be far harder to detect. It is not clear from TFA if the hackers will have access to the source code, but since it says they will not be allowed to "tweak" the EVMs, it sounds like they will not, and they certainly will not be allowed to recompile to install instrumentation to capture intermediate state. They are also only give 4-5 days, which is nowhere near enough time to understand a complex system.

This "hacker challenge" is designed to ensure failure. Why? They only reason I can think of is that they are hiding something.