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Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is running on an outdated operating system.
Atiku warned that the technology could expose Nigeria’s 2027 elections to cyberattacks and data manipulation.
The African Democratic Congress presidential candidate’s comments followed a disclosure by the Independent National Electoral Commission’s director of ICT, Lawrence Bayode, who said on Monday that BVAS devices, first deployed in 2021, are still running on Android version 10.
“It is currently running on Android version 10. And that was the version that it was deployed with when we first procured the BVAS. So, our BVAS has never run on Android 3, 2, 6 or 7. It is currently running on Android version 10,” Bayode told Arise TV.
What Atiku is questioning
Atiku, in a statement by its Atiku Media Office, asked why INEC had not updated the BVAS software before the 2027 general elections or tested a newer version during recent off-season polls, including the Osun State governorship election.
He described the commission’s handling of the matter as “suspicious” and said it could be a deliberate attempt to subvert the integrity of the country’s elections.
He claims that this vulnerability could enable hackers or criminal elements to completely circumvent the BVAS application, obtain root access to the device file system, and possibly modify cached voter logs or polling unit result files prior to transmission.
Atiku noted that since BVAS machines must necessarily transmit polling unit results over weak public telecommunication networks to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, outdated cryptographic foundations elevate the risk of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, where sophisticated actors could intercept, block, or manipulate data packets over the air.
The former vice president noted that an antiquated biometric framework, like the one INEC continues to use, could “reduce the system’s accuracy and resilience against spoofing methods such as fingerprint and photo bypasses” because BVAS manages both fingerprint and facial recognition.
