… Faults End-of-life Operating System Poses Severe Cyber, Operational Risks
Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has expressed concern over what he described as outdated Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS) for the 2027 general elections, stressing that an outdated operating system will pose severe cyber and operational risks.
According to him, the Osun State mock-accreditation failures of August 1, 2026, and Monday’s revelation by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode, have exposed the inadequacies of the BVAS, a critical asset in the conduct of elections in Nigeria.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Atiku Media Office recalled that, while speaking on Arise TV on Monday, Bayode said that BVAS, which was first introduced in the 2021 elections, is currently running on Android version 10.
Atiku noted, however, that what the INEC ICT Director didn’t say is that Android 10 is outdated, as it reached end of life in 2023, meaning it’s no longer receiving updates or security patches.
The ADC presidential candidate said that running an election technology platform like BVAS on an outdated operating system poses severe cyber and operational risks.
He wonders why INEC, with its humongous budget, cannot update the BVAS software long before the 2027 general elections, or even before the series of off-season elections, such as the Osun State governorship election, during which the updated version would have been test-run.
Atiku said that the nonchalant attitude of handling the BVAS issue is suspicious and a deliberate attempt to subvert the integrity of the country’s elections.
According to him, this vulnerability could allow criminal elements or hackers to bypass the BVAS application entirely, gain root access to the device file system, and potentially alter cached voter logs or polling unit result files before they are transmitted.
He noted that since BVAS machines must transmit polling unit results over weak public telecommunication networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, outdated cryptographic foundations increase the risk of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, in which sophisticated actors could intercept, block, or manipulate data packets in transit.
The former Vice President pointed out that because BVAS handles both fingerprint and facial recognition, an outdated biometric framework (such as the one INEC is still using) has the potential to “reduce the system’s accuracy and resilience against spoofing methods such as fingerprint and photo bypasses.”
He expressed deep concern that “bugs or memory leaks within legacy system frameworks can cause the app to crash during peak voting hours —leading to ‘technical glitches’ and delayed accreditations as have been witnessed in the past.”
He supported the position of cybersecurity experts that “running critical national infrastructure on an end-of-life operating system creates a broad attack surface. “To safeguard election integrity, it’s vital to perform an independent, comprehensive code and hardware audit of the BVAS devices.”
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