Comelec’s vote-counting machines protected from hackers — Supplier

The automated counting machines (ACMs) to be used by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the May 2004 polls are highly secured and cannot be hacked because of their advanced security protection, the machine supplier maintained yesterday.

Lawyer Alfredo Lazaro Jr., spokesman for the Mega Pacific Consortium (MPC), said the machines are provided with 168-bit Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) cryptographic technology and 1024-bit Digital Certificates provided by the world-renowned "VeriSign" technology. "We are actually using better encryption technology because almost all of the international banking and Internet electronic transactions today are using only 128-bit encryption while we are using the bigger 168-bit for our ACM data encryption," he said.

"Even our 1024-bit Digital Certificates is of similar strength with US military encryption standard that protect the nuclear missiles launch codes," he stressed.

He said that it would take significantly longer than the estimated 10 to 15 billion years age of the universe to even get near to cracking the 168-bit key.

"Even if you connect or network all the computers connected in the Internet it will take trillions of years to break the 1024-bit encryption algorithm keys we are using with our ACMs," he added.

"Let’s assume for the sake of argument, that someone did manage to intercept and decrypt an electronic transaction, it does not mean that they have found all the private keys," he said. "If they want to decrypt another transaction they would need to spend as much time and effort on the second transaction as they did on the first," he added.

While there were reports that a 40-bit key can be decrypted because of its vulnerability to "brutal force" attack, Lazaro said that a 128-bit key being used in global financial transactions eliminate any problem at all "because there are 2^128 (or 339 followed by 33 zeroes) instead of 2^40 (more than 1 trillion) possible combinations or keys."

He pointed out that to crack a message encrypted with such key would need supercomputers and take significantly longer than the age of the universe using convention technology.

"Remember that 128-bit is not just ‘three times’ as powerful as the 40-bit encryption, 2^128 is two times two, times two, ... with 128 two’s, and take note in our ACMs we are using superior 168-bit 3DES and 1024-bit encryption technology," he said.

Lazaro averred that it would take about 72 million weeks to even break 56-bit medium encryption and much more with the 168-bit key.

Aside from its internal security features, only authorized Comelec officers and operator with 16-digit Personal Identification Number (PIN) and restricted USB key with 1024-bit Digital Certificate can operate the counting machine, he further said.

Lazaro also maintained that local election results, in municipal city level, would be known in about 24 hours and in 36 hours for provincial and national election results because of the machine’s capability to read 50 ballots per minute.

The ACM reads both sides of the ballots simultaneously and detects both fake and previously read ballots with Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) coding as required by law.