India, May 28 -- A 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher has claimed that the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal contained a hard-coded "master password" that could allegedly be used to bypass OTP verification, log into examiner accounts and even tamper with students' marks.

The claims were made by Nisarga Adhikary, who told Hindustan Times that he discovered the alleged vulnerability while examining the backend code of the OSM platform introduced this year for Class 12 board examinations.

CBSE, however, has denied that the actual evaluation portal was compromised, saying the vulnerabilities highlighted by the teenager related only to a "testing site" containing sample data.

CBSE introduced the ...