Bagong Botante: Automated 2010 Elections are Safe!

Posted on November 16th, 2009. Written by Rico.

So the people behind the machines to be used in the 2010 elections have developed Bagong Botante, a “social network site” to explain the automated election process, an attempt to convince more people that the upcoming 2010 elections are safeguarded against irregularities.

Aside from a FAQ summarizing the various steps used to protect the votes as they’re transmitted from precinct to server, the site also features photos, videos, and blogs. Not to mention a forum, where a super-technical post explains why it’s practically impossible to intercept, decrypt, and modify election returns as they’re transmitted for final processing. Here’s a particularly head-scratching snippet:

“We presented related-key boomerang attacks on the full AES-192 and the full AES-256. The differential trails for the attacks are based on the idea of finding local collisions in the block cipher. We showed that optimal key-schedule trails should be based on low-weight codewords in the key schedule. We also exploit various boomerang-switching techniques, which help us to gain free rounds in the middle of the cipher. However, both our attacks are still mainly of theoretical interest and do not present a threat to practical applications using AES.”

Ano daw? In any case, Bagong Botante is part of a campaign to convince the electorate that of the upcoming automated elections’ integrity, which has included media events to highlight the security of the system.

Personally, now that such a campaign is in full swing, I’m more convinced that the Philippines can successfully pull this off come 2010. What about you? I just wish proponents of election automation started such a campaign sooner.