Biometric ID at the KIEMS kit
The voter presents their ID or passport. The Presiding Officer uses the KIEMS kit's biometric reader to verify the voter's fingerprint against the register before issuing ballot papers. This repeats for every voter, all day.
Every secure transaction on polling day — voter authentication, on-device signing of Form 34A, mutual-TLS transmission to RTS, and results ingestion at national tallying — is anchored by a named digital certificate. Below is the certificate inventory required to cover the full IEBC operational footprint end-to-end.
Before any kit reaches a polling station
The officer's day doesn't change — the crypto works underneath
Officer removes the SD card — certs and private keys travel with the card. A ward-level backup kit re-validates the chain; officer re-authenticates with the same fingerprint. Commissioning record updated with the new kit serial.
Treated as a revocation event, not a swap. Card certificates revoked at the CA; new card issued via expedited field revalidation using the officer's existing biometric enrolment. Rare edge-of-edge case.
Biometric capture plus a CSR the CA signs within minutes. Certificate is loaded onto the card well within normal last-minute reassignment windows — an operational, not cryptographic, bottleneck.
A PIN / passphrase serves as the secondary unlock factor — the same fallback pattern the EVID system already uses for voters. A genuinely unreadable print never blocks signing.
Signing is entirely local — fingerprint and certificate both live on the card, no live server needed. Connectivity is only required at RTS transmission, which already has satellite backup.
RTS validates every submission against the eMudhra-rooted trust chain via mutual TLS. A kit without a valid, registered device DSC cannot establish the connection — let alone submit results.
Every entry above resolves to the same single trust chain. One licensed root, hundreds of thousands of leaves — devices, officers, and agents — each individually accountable, revocable, and cryptographically verifiable from the polling station all the way to the National Tallying Centre.