India arrests hacker who exposed EVM vulnerability

Hari Prasad , a Computer Scientist and Security Researcher (Hacker ) has been arrested by police in Hyderabad . Hari Prasad is the same person  who exposed weakness in India's Computerized Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) that could allow corrupt politicians to steal votes . According to the reports Prasad is arrested because he refused to disclose an anonymous source who provided an electronic voting machine.


In 2009, the Election commission publicly challenged Prasad to show that India's voting machines could be compromised, but refused to give him access to the machines to perform a review. Earlier this year, an anonymous source provided an Indian voting machine to a research team led by Prasad, Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp. The team exposed security flaws  that could allow an attacker to change election results and compromise ballot secrecy. They published a paper detailing their findings, which you can read here. His team demonstrated how India's paperless voting machines can be tampered with in two ways to fix elections.

Halderman wrote on his blog. "The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source." Here's a taped telephone conversation that Prasad had with Halderman on a cellphone as he was being carted away by the Mumbai police