Expert Urges INEC to Carry Out Stress Test on BVAS Technology

Emma Okonji

With few days to the country’s presidential election, the Chief Executive Officer of New Horizons Nigeria, Mr. Tim Akano, has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to conduct a stress test on Data-in-Motion or Data-in-Transit on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), before the election.

Akano said the BIVAS test would ensure stronger security protection for data transmission before the general election slated for February 25th, 2023, since it would be the first time in the history of the country that live data would be used to determine who wins the presidential election and other elections.

He gave the advice, while speaking during this year’s World Data Privacy Day, organised recently by the Data and Knowledge Privacy Protection Initiative, with the theme: ‘Understanding Privacy and Online Risk in the Digital World Today.’

According to Akano, the inferno that can burn us 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 attention to what is described as ‘the man in the middle attack’, which hackers can exploit to intercept, modify, or retransmit election data while in motion or in transit.

“There is nothing more important in Nigeria today than the success of the February 2023 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 said.

He pointing out instances where conflicting results in other countries had lead to untold bloodbath, adding that between 2007 and 2008, Kenya witnessed an untold bloodbath arising from conflicting election results. 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.