Each data recipient will have a separate, secure server to preserve original vote data

MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Elections (Comelec) expressed confidence that it will be able to prevent hackers from accessing the transmission of election data in the May elections.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez told reporters Wednesday that even though the system is not totally free from being hacked, the poll body has set up the necessary safeguards.

Right after closing the voting precincts at 6 p.m. on May 10, a gadget similar to a portable wireless broadband will be connected to the election machines for the transmission of votes. Data from the election machines will be sent to servers allotted for the municipal canvassers, the Comelec central office in Intramuros, the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster sa Pilipinas (KBP), the accredited citizen arm, and to a secured public server owned by Comelec.

Jimenez said that it is only during the transmission of votes, which will take about 2 minutes only, that the machines will be open online.

There have been concerns about the security of government websites after those of the Department of Health and the Department of Social Welfare and Development were recently attacked by hackers.

Jimenez, however, expressed confidence that the Comelec's website will not suffer the same fate. He said the Comelec website (www.comelec.gov.ph) is hosted in a secure server, and that they have people constantly monitoring the site against hackers. "The site is up for more than 5 years. It has never been attacked. So we're pretty confident about our security there.”

Auditing purposes

As for the vote transmission, Jimenez explained that the process will take place within a virtual private network, and data will be sent and stored in secure, separate servers for each data recipient. "That way, you minimize the possibility of being hacked," he said.

He added that having various recipients of vote data will give them redundancies in back-up. "You attack one, it doesn't mean you hit everything. We are able to maintain the integrity [of votes] in that way."
"It's also to reveal the existence [and source] of a flaw," Jimenez said, also explaining that the system of redundancy will work for auditing purposes, especially at the municipal level where the possibility of hacking is the greatest because the data would be seen in public. "If you have multiple trusted original, and you have one discrepancy, alam mo kung saan ka tatakbo pag nagka problema."

The poll body was able to test its capability of blocking hackers during data transmission of votes in a mock online voting held in 2007 in Singapore. This mock online voting tested the possibility of the system for overseas absentee voters. Online voting for OAV, however, was not implemented that year.

Jimenez said that they tried several attempts to hack the system during the mock online voting, but all were blocked by its monitoring team. "We are confident that we could do the same thing for the electronic transmission," he said. - Newsbreak