THE Commission on Elections on Wednesday placed the source code for the country’s automated election system in escrow with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas as required by the poll election law.
In a simple ceremony held at the BSP compound in Manila, Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista surrendered the source code of the Election Management System component of the automated election system to the central bank.
“We need to deposit the source code to the BSP since it is required by the Republic Act No. 9369,” Bautista said.
Section 9 of the Poll Automation Law provides that the source code must be kept in escrow with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
Placed inside a safety deposit box is the thumb drive containing the source code, binary codes, and hash codes of the EMS; as well as the certifications of the technical evaluation committee, the Comelec and the international certification firm, SLI Global Solutions.
The escrow agreement was concluded just hours after the Comelec, SLI, and AES service provider, Smartmatic International, completed the “trusted build” process of the EMS on Tuesday.
“It is provided by law that we need to have it escrowed as soon as the trusted build is completed,” Bautista said.
“The BSP is the most secured place in the Philippines,” said BSP Deputy Governor Vicente Aquino.
“We ensure that this source code, the safety deposit box containing the source code will be safely kept. We will ensure that it will be safe. We will not touch it. We will not look into it. We will not look at it. We will just ensure that it is there untouched by anyone,” Aquino said.
Comelec Commissioner Christian Robert Lim, meanwhile, said the separate source codes for the Consolidation and Canvassing System as well as the Vote Counting Machines will also be placed in escrow by Feb. 9.
“The source code review and trusted build of the CCS and VCMs are not yet finished so we decided to go ahead with the EMS [escrow],” said Lim, who is the Comelec—Steering Committee for the 2016 polls chairman.
Lim explained that the source code for the EMS is the one that will be loaded into their main server, while the CCS source code will be for the laptops to be used in canvassing centers. The VCMs have a separate source code to be loaded.
With the EMS source code now in escrow, Bautista said they will be developing a protocol that will ensure that getting into them will not be easy.
“We will make sure that no one person on his or her own desire be able to enter the vault. We will build this checks and balances and additional security safeguards,” the poll chief said.
The Comelec is set to pay the BSP an amount of P1,700 per month for the deposit of the source codes.