Supercomputer will take over 13 billion years to hack Aadhaar data: UIDAI chief to Supreme Court

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief Ajay Bhushan Pandey on Thursday informed the Supreme Court that Aadhaar data was completely safe and it had been secured by 2048-bit encryption key that would take a supercomputer more than the age of universe to hack the system.

“Once Aadhaar data reaches the central database, it cannot be shared with anyone except on grounds of national security,” said Pandey while giving a PowerPoint presentation to the five-member bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday.

Pandey was making the presentation at the Supreme Court to establish that the UIDAI has taken adequate steps to ensure that its database is 100 per cent secure and cannot be accessed by anyone.

The UIDAI chief also informed the Supreme Court bench headed by Dipak Misra that they had recieved around four lakh authentication requests in a day but underlined that the authority did not collect the location or purpose of the transaction.

“Face identification will also be used for authentication from July 1, 2018,” Pandey added.

However, the judges hearing a batch of pleas that challenge the Aadhaar Law, showed concerned about frequent reports of people being denied services because Aadhar programme wasn’t able to authenticate their identity.

Stating an example of Jharkhand, where a woman was not provided ration as authentication failed, the Supreme Court asked, “The ration was shown as delivered. How do you deal with such a situation.”

“Every problem can’t be solved. In our probe we found that in the same village, the shopkeeper had denied food grains to others too, saying biometrics didn’t match. But it matched,” UIDAI chief said.

Pandey will continue the presentation in front of the Supreme Court bench on March 22.

Attorney General Venugopal KK  on Wednesday had requested the Supreme Court to allow UIDAI chief to present a PowerPoint presentation to explain the technical details to the bench hearing the legal challenge to the Aadhar Law.  

Aadhaar was launched by the UPA in 2009-10 to reduce the government's subsidy bill and improve the delivery of services. In 2016, the BJP-led NDA government pushed a law through parliament, which made compulsory for people to produce their 12-digit Aadhaar number to access government services.