Cloned e-passports?
p2pnet.net News:- Following a claim, last week, that RFID “enabled” German e-passports could be penetrated, the Smart Card Alliance’s Randy Vanderhoof has argued that data encoded to the chip inside an e-passport is digitally signed and locked by the issuing nation, and couldn’t be altered even if it was cloned. says the RFID Journal.
At the Defcon computer security conference in Las Vegas, Lukas Grunwald showed showed how someone could duplicate an RFID spy chip with an inexpensive RFID reader and smart card writer
But, says Vanderhoof, Grunwald’S demo hadn’t demonsrated electronic passports were less secure because, “the passport inspectors will still examine the chip’s encoded photo and compare it with the person who presents the passport,” says the story.:
According to Vanderhoof, cloning a passport’s inlay, “would be no different, in our point of view, than stealing someone else’s passport and trying to present that as your own at a border entry point”.
But what if a country removed the manual inspection process, relying instead only on data presented to an interrogator at a border crossing?
“Obviously it would be better to have anticloning features [on e-passports], but [e-passports] may well be more secure than the [ones without RFID], in which photos can be grafted into real passports or inserted into fake ones,” the RFID Journal has Ari Juels, principal research scientist for RSA Laboratories, the research arm of RSA Security, saying.
Juels says Grunwald’s result “is a useful demonstration, but does not really teach anything new,” the story adds.
“A system with cloneable passports is roughly equivalent in security to a database with integrity protection. Anyone can claim to be another person; the system relies on a physical identity check for its success.”
(Thanks, Ward)
Also See:
RFID “enabled” – RFID passport cracked, August 8, 2006
RFID Journal – Industry Group Says E-Passport Clone Poses Little Risk, August 9, 2006
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