To speculate it is easy. The thing is to meaningfully topple a score in a country size of India you need a loooot of boots on ground doing the dirty work. @
egodoc222 has already visited the scenario.
No matter what country you are, it boils down to basic mathematics. We can easily assume that these sensitive machines are running a custom flavor of AES or SHA-1 algos. Or something even better. Now the cost of decoding anything with a key size greater than 103 is out of this world [ Source:
Google Sheets - create and edit spreadsheets online, for free., Do not tell me its a fanboy creation. Some very serious people came up with this], forget about it if its greater than 256. I am not saying its un crackable, I am saying that cracking it, within a brief period of time, being un tractable while doing so (i,e Doing it without raising suspicion) and doing it to a good nos of EVMs to make a change, is pretty much impossible.
The only way this can be done is if some one breaks into each and every counting booths when these EVM's are present (i,e Last 2 days), plugs each and every or a sizable amount of EVMs to a HyperComputer, Override the inbuilt safe gaurds, Change the poll results, reseal the EVMs , erase all evidence of any wrong, doing this while being undetected by the hordes of security guarding them.And all of the above within a time frame of few hrs. Not to forget the cost penalty the country/organization/individual will face while undertaking this kind of operation. If not Impossible it's improbable .
Edit: 1 more estmation:-
The average cost for electricity in the US is $0.12 per kWh. For a single server I'll use
3741 kWh annually as an estimate. That would be about $450 per year for one machine.
Let's say you can do 1014 decryptions per second. That is 3.15∗1021 decrypts per year for one machine. You need to do (on average) 2255 decryptions in a year, so you would need 22553.15∗1021≈1.84∗1055 machines. To figure your cost you would multiply that by $450 and get about$8∗1057 or 8
octodecillion dollars. World GDP is about 63∗1012, so brute-forcing a 256-bit key would cost about 1044 times the world GDP.
You can follow similar math to get the cost of brute forcing a 128-bit key.
NOTE: I am completely ignoring hardware costs, maintenance, etc. The estimate above is for electricity only. We can take a hint from the NSA on this. You'd be a lot better off hiring a few thousand mathematicians and have them work on breaking the cipher as opposed to trying to brute-force it.
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