Arogya Setu: "People's Privacy in Question" claims Hacker; Government Responds!

The Aarogya Setu application was heavily promoted by the government and the Prime Minister himself, as it helps in keeping track of the novel coronavirus infection. The application has been downloaded 80 million times and more since its commencement. However, an ethical hacker on Tuesday, warned the government through twitter saying that the application is vulnerable to security breach.

The hacker claimed that the security of 90 million people is at stake and had also asked the government to contact him.

As a response to this claim the Aarogya Setu team shared an official statement on Twitter, on Wednesday,  saying that they have discussed how the application collects location and information and confirmed that it is stored in a server which is secure, encrypted, and anonymised. Their statement also read, "No personal information of any user has been proven to be at risk by this ethical hacker” and there was "no data or security breach.” The statement also said, “Users can get the COVID-19 stats displayed on Home Screen by changing the radius and latitude and longitude”, and the government said that "the radius parameters are fixed and can only take one of the few values: 500 meters, 1km, 2km, 5km, and 10km. These values are standard parameters posted with HTTP headers."

The hacker, however, didn’t seem convinced as he wrote on twitter, “Basically, you said "nothing to see here." We will see. I will come back to you tomorrow.”

Since Tuesday, the application is also made compulsory in some localities like Noida, where if a person doesn’t have the application, he/she can even be jailed for a period of six months.