The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) said on Sunday that it is "closely monitoring" the vulnerabilities on-screen marking (OSM) portal of its service provider following concerns regarding the public domain.
In a post on micro-blogging site X (formerly Twitter), the board said a team of cybersecurity professionals from several government agencies and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been deployed to "fortify" the system and take them over to a more secure set up.
The teams have been working for several days on this, the CBSE said. "The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out."
"We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly," the CBSE's statement read. "We request any others to reach out to our security teams at secy-cbse@nic.in for any further inputs."
What's the controversy?
The controversy erupted after a class 12 student, Vedant, alleged that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by the CBSE under the revaluation process was not his. He had posted about it on X, which went viral after which several students made similar claims.
Citing government sources, news agency PTI reported that the answer-sheet mix-up was detected in around 20 cases during the OSM process. The report stated that over 98 lakh answer sheets were scanned through the OSM system. Now, experts from Digital Infrastructure Corporation of India (DICI) and IITs are examining the system.
"In some cases, there was a mix-up in scanning. Such cases are around 20. Students pointed it out after accessing their answer sheets," the sources told PTI. "Out of these 98 lakh answer sheets, around 68,000 were found to have quality issues during scanning and were rescanned. Eventually, a little over 13,000 copies still did not attain the required legible quality even after rescanning."
The sources further stated that answer sheets and mark sheets will be available on DigiLocker from next year, pointing out that technology gives a "certain kind of transparency". "Whenever you do something for the first time, there are challenges," the sources said.
