Expert Tasks INEC to Carry Out Stress Test on BVAS Before Election

Ahead of the 2023 general elections, which are less than a month, the Chief Executive Officer of New Horizons Nigeria, Tim Akano, has advised the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct a stress test on Data-in-Motion or in Transit on Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), before the election proper.

Akano said this would help to ensure that there is stronger security protection for data transmission before the elections.

Speaking on a topic, themed: “Understanding privacy and online risk in the digital world today,” to mark this year’s World Data Privacy Day, organized by the Data and Knowledge Privacy Protection Initiative, the New Horizon boss said the 2023 election will be the first time in the history of the country that live data will be used to determine who will be the next president of the country.

According to Akano, the inferno that can burn Nigeria as a country is the use of live data that is vulnerable to attack, noting it is in the best interest of INEC in particular and Nigeria, in general, to pay more than casual attention to what is called the man in the middle attack, which hackers can exploit to intercept, modify, or retransmit election data while in motion or in transit.

He continued: “There is nothing more important in Nigeria today than the success of the February election, and we are a country of about 222 million, and nothing must go wrong because the entire West African coast, from Benin Republic to Togo to Ghana, does not have the infrastructure to sustain us.”

Akano, pointing out instances where conflicting results in other countries had led to untold bloodbath, said between 2007 and 2008, Kenya witnessed an untold bloodbath arising from conflicting election results.

“In 2010 and 2011, Mr. Devil himself took over the affairs of Ivory Coast when conflicting election results were announced. In 2016, Russia was alleged to have influenced the American presidential elections through technology, and in the recent Osun Governorship Tribunal judgment, three types of BVAS results on the same election were alleged to have been tendered and this should not be because Maths is exact, absolute,” he stated.

Referencing the 2022 Securonix Threat, Akano said the report revealed that insiders were involved in 57 per cent of data breaches “and there are new technological solutions to this if INEC cares to prevent that.”

While commending INEC for the end-to-end encryption they have done for the technology, he however, called on INEC Chairman to urgently talk to some Nigerian Cyber security practitioners and appoint some devil’s advocate, who will conduct a stress test on BVAS DIM (Data- in- Motion) before the wholesale adoption on February 25th, saying it is common practice for big companies such as Microsoft and Oracle to carry out test on new develop software by  calling on strong hackers to test it and see if they can hack into it easily, and if they can, then they go back to their lab to ensure they work on it.

Akano, going forward, advised INEC to carry out an upgrade after the election to ensure that the issue of over-voting does not arise from BVAS by building in a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) which will alert you when over-voting arises from the polling unit.