Reality Bytes

“Try me!”-Philippine Election Automation System

Posted on 22. Apr, 2009 by jesh in Review

Everyone in the IT industry and field are laughing about it. Recently, Cayetano has been bragging about the ability of the new, hi-tech and state-of-the-art system that shall be used for the Philippine Elections this 2010. Personally, and being part of the IT industry, I find his statements totally hilarious. Security matters are not those common topics being challenged. Programming schemes and techniques are ennumerable. The IT sector would always say that there is always a way for the end result to be visible and it is the implementation that matters.

Nowadays, computer security has been a grave issue. To simply put, nothing in this world of information systems and technology is safe. With this statement, you might say that there is no use for automation and information improvement. Of which, that is wrong. Yes indeed nothing is safe and secure. However, it is in the strategy and contingency plans placed to secure and “prevent” your system from such attacks.

Application source code inspection is the most absurd act. This leads to only more opportunity for attack and exploitation. Knowing the source code and algorithm would also give a venue for system hackers to identify loop holes within the system. This would then make your 128, 256 or so-bit encryption scheme useless. Unit, integration, and system test plan documents are enough to prove the reliability of the system. Application source codes are not supposed to be visible to end-users and to the public. Nevertheless, this system has been published to be an Open Source Software.

It has been a few years since I have been dealing with Information Systems. Being a developer and lead technical designer of a various project developments, it entails a lot of end advantages in the part of the development team. As system developers, there is a special feature referred to as the “System Backdoor”. Wikipedia defines a System Backdoor as “a method of bypassing normal authentication, securing remote access to a computer, obtaining access to plaintext, and so on, while attempting to remain undetected. The backdoor may take the form of an installed program, or could be a modification to an existing program or hardware device.” It may also be planted directly by the system developer for the convenience within the duration of the development phase.

With this kind of challenges, I remember the conspiracy behind system applications and softwares. Right now, one of the problems the IT industry is facing is regarding Piracy. Not only does it involve music and movie piracy but also software application piracy. Cracks and Key generators for high end and famous PC games, applications and operating systems have been circulating all over the internet most especially in torrent sites and peer-to-peer applications. The question of conspiracy lies not on the question of who are circulating this applications, but what kind of persons are they. And the mostly heard answers is that they are programmers from EAGames, Blizzard, Microsoft and the like are the one’s that distribute them. Moving on with the analogy, saying that there could be someone that could crack the election system, there is a possibility that he or she is part of the system’s development team. This has not yet been proven, however, it remains to be a conspiracy.

Relating altogether, as a devoted programmer and an anticipating voter, this challenge might have gone out of hand. This might imply that Filipinos are indeed intelligent persons that could be able to get into this high-tech system or politicians are just desperate to prove their innocence to corruption and lack of submission to a fair political campaign and contest. This issue was possibly raised because of another posibility of attack intentions to the system are comming from the candidates themselves. However, putting it to the innovative and technological point of view, preventive measures are better means of security rather than reliability assurance.

Tags: Critiques, Election, IT, Philippines, Reviews