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Audit and consultancy firm PwC India roped in to beef up Aadhaar security

Posted Date : 03-Nov-2015 , 08:07:19 am | Posted By CASANSAAR print Print
With concerns related to privacy and security threatening the very existence of the Aadhaar project, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has employed the services of an external agency to carry out periodic audits of Aadhaar's infrastructure as well as that of its partners for any security hazards. 

Audit and consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers India has been roped in for building an additional layer of oversight by reviewing the security of the entire ecosystem that includes UIDAI data centres and servers along with that of government departments and private agencies such as banks that are engaging with Aadhaar for authenticating citizen information. 

Sivarama Krishnan, executive director of PwC, said that with a national project of the scale of UID, threats are bound to be manifold. "The right step is to first build the trust in the system and then protect it from all internal as well as external threats," he said. 
Audit and consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers India roped in to beef up Aadhaar security
 Krishnan added that the current mandate will ensure the "extra oversight" and may help in quelling some fears such as those expressed by the judiciary and other privacy activists. 

The Supreme Court had recently restricted the usage of the Aadhaar number to just two government welfare schemes — cooking gas and public distribution system — over concerns of privacy and security of citizen data. The apex court later expanded the usage to four more schemes, including pensions,
Jan Dhan Yojana and the national rural employment guarantee scheme, after a clutch of government departments and regulators filed applications in the court to review the order. 
 
 
UIDAI director general ABP Pandey told ET that the idea behind getting a professional agency on board is to regularly review if its partners are conforming to the security standard and check for any gaps, which can be brought to UID's notice. "We have always taken a stand that we will ensure that our system remains fully secure and we are taking every step in that direction," he added. 

Pandey said that even though there have been hacking attacks on the UID's infrastructure currently such attacks don't reach its systems. "The way we have designed our technology is that the main data is not stored on any cloud; it is completely isolated. So even if people try to access it, they won't be able to get to the core," he said. 

As a governance, risk, compliance and performance service provider, PwC will monitor agencies that are securing the UID infrastructure along with other third party agencies such as ministries and companies using UIDAI database for verification of data. 

Though Aadhaar has already issued a set of guidelines and standards that need to be complied with while using its applications, "UIDIA doesn't want to take a chance and wants to ensure that it is a zero or least incident organisation", said PwC's Krishnan. 

"Aadhaar is becoming the fulcrum for many government projects and even one or few mistakes can demolish the trust, so an extra oversight is needed," he said. While UIDAI has built its own data centres, most of its other technology is outsourced to HCL Infosystems, which acts as its managed service provider. Aadhaar has so far covered almost 93 crore residents of the country. (Economic Times)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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