Well, it's true that if you already possess a passport and want to copy it, it's essentially the same problem with and without an RFID. It's also true that the RFID chip does stop the basic hack of replacing the photo in the passport (since the data on the chip is persumably read-only, and the chip can't be replaced without mutilating the passport).
I think what the esteemed spokesman missed is the privacy implications (I can now read your passport without your knowledge). In particular, you can clone these passports without actually holding the original. In the past to clone a passport you needed the co-operation of its owner (if you steal a passport it's known to be stolen). Now you can make your own sure-to-be valid passport by just stepping into the airport and choosing an appropriate victim (someone who looks like you, perhaps?).
A UK Home Office spokesman dismissed it all, saying "It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."
But isn't the whole point of a secure passport to secure the identity of an individual? If the identity is not secure, we may as well not waste the time or money.
The ID cards themselves are just a distraction. The real agenda is the setting up of a big database with information on all citizens. While everyone debates ID cards, they get to do what they want with the database proposal. They can back down on ID cards later, and everyone is happy.
Your birth certificate number could be read as CN.DN.cert-number. You have a social insurance number, social security number, or equivalent. You are numbered by your driver's license, your chequing account, your power bill, and a host of other unique identifiers.
I have no objection to SECURE identification. I object to wasting billions on useless crap.
Yes, governments have databases about the citizens of their countries, for tax purposes, medical purposes, driver licensing and so on. That in itself is not unreasonable, as long as the data collected is necessary for the purpose, properly and securely handled, with suitable checks made on those with access to it and confidentiality maintained.
The National Identity Register in the UK, however, will combine most of the existing government databases into a single, centralised point of failure. In practice, it will likely be the case that most government departments and many outside agencies will have access to all of the records about an individual, not just those they have reason to see.
A second major concern is that the NIR will track every time it is checked. That won't help with the identity theft problem that follows from the above, unless the security of access is near-perfect across many thousands of people with access to the database. It will, however, mean that once the national ID card becomes the "easy option" for identity verification, the government has a handy record of each citizen's entire life: where they shop, which financial services they've been using, jobs they've been applying for, where they've travelled and who with, etc. There is simply no need for any state organisation to keep this sort of information about any citizen, other than when conducting legitimate surveillance of a suspect for genuine security purposes, with independent oversight.
Identity thieves, however, already happy to be part of the fastest-growing and most profitable crime wave in recent history, have hit the jackpot. Just along the Slashdot front page from this story as I write this, there is another article estimating that 100 million personal information leaks have occurred within the past couple of years or so. If that combination isn't reason enough to stop the NIR plans right now, I don't know what kind of sanity prevails in the government's universe.
It's also true that the RFID chip does stop the basic hack of replacing the photo in the passport (since the data on the chip is persumably read-only, and the chip can't be replaced without mutilating the passport).
Stronger than that, the data on the chip is digitally signed, so even if you can tracelessly replace the chip in the passport with a different one that has the photo you want, you're not going to be able to generate the appropriate digital signature for the altered data. This technology makes the passports effectively unalterable, as long as the chip is intact.
I think what the esteemed spokesman missed is the privacy implications (I can now read your passport without your knowledge). In particular, you can clone these passports without actually holding the original.
Not exactly. To read the passport data you have to have the authentication key. To get the authentication key, you need to have the passport, because the data that the key is derived from is printed inside. Note, however, that it has been shown that a large enough portion of the printed data is guessable, given basic information like the passport holder's name and a guess at his or her age, that the rest can be brute-forced pretty quickly. So there *is* a possibility it could be read without the owner's knowledge, but it's not completely trivial and does require some additional information.
The US has addressed this issue by putting a shielding mesh in the passport cover, which isolates the chip when the cover is closed.
"It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."
Just like it is hard to see why anyone would want to blow up an aircraft? I think that people are still thinking within the sandbox and not realising that the real risk is what we have not yet thought of. There will be lots of reasons to want to access the information and to change it or learn to create false IDs that Joe Average security assumes to be valid because it is state of the art.
I guess that's what they call a failure of imagination.
It's a common failure that occurs in these scenarios.
As part of my research on driver's licensing issues, when states added photos to driver's licenses (starting in the late 60's) the word "fraud" never entered the picture. Driver's licenses were essentially fraud free documents before the photographs were added--so it really never entered anyone's mind that things would change once the document became more powerful/useful/trusted.
UYFB (Use Your F***ing Brain): Do you want all the info on your passport's personal details page readable by absolutely everyone you walk by?
Passport cloning isn't even the primary security concern here. Cloning a passport has become no harder or easier thanks to RFID. But Identity theft will become much much easier.
Cloning a passport has become no harder or easier thanks to RFID. But Identity theft will become much much easier.
Couldn't one kill the RFID chip by putting the passport in a microwave oven for a minute?
I can't imagine the rubber-stamper at immigration control not letting me through because he can't read my RFID tag... I'm sure a good percentage of non-zapped passports would fail to scan for one reason or another. If enough people did it, then they justn wouldn't be able to rely on them, period.
Actually, they can and will deport you if the chip doesn't work.
You make the invalid assumption that people at immigration desks are reasonable people - they are *not*. Some of them are little Hitlers with bad attitude, and the ones who aren't have their hands tied by the law - they have no discretion at all. If the law says you can't enter without a working chip, the immigration officer (even the world's friendliest and most reasonable one) has no choice but to deport you. Just as they would deport you if your passport photo was mutilated.
(I'll make one exception for the little Hitlers - one notable aberration is Houston's immigration desks - those people are polite and make you feel welcome to the United States - truly refreshing to get to an immigration desk where it isn't just stony faces and demands to see that you have a return plane ticket. I frequently travel through Houston and they've always had good people there. Dallas Ft.Worth on the other hand - I will never travel through that airport again).
Please stop with the FUD. The new passport is bad enough without adding fuel to the fire. Check out the official information according to the US Government.
What will happen if my Electronic passport fails at a port-of-entry?
The chip in the passport is just one of the many security features of the new passport. If the chip fails, the passport remains a valid travel document until its expiration date. The bearer will continue to processed by the port-of-entry officer as if he/she had a passport without a chip.
I disagree. It's pretty good security. It does have one flaw, that there's not enough entropy in the MRID (the info printed on the inside that is needed to authenticate to the chip) which makes brute force searches too easy, but if that flaw were fixed, I would call it very good security.
"It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip." Hmmm... it's also hard to see why anyone would want my credit card information, SSN, address, etc. I'm sure nobody really wants to know any personal information about me at all, and I'm sure nobody would ever want to forge any of my identifying documentation.
Something is just wrong with the UK's Home Office. Today I read that they will now classify panty theifs as sex offenders [sundaymirror.co.uk], receiving the same long-term classification on the sex offenders' registry as child abusers, rapists, and child pornographers.
If my name is written on someone else's panties, I demand to know why!
ob Simpsons: Skinner: Oh, it's a miracle no one was hurt. Otto: I stand on my record - fifteen crashes and not a single fatality! Lou: Let's see your license, pal. Otto: No can do. Never got one. But, if you need proof of my identity, I wrote my name on my underwear... Oh wait, these aren't mine! Skinner: Well that tears it! Until you get a license and wear your own underwear, mister, you are suspended without pay!
what a fucking crock of shit. someone stealing a womens underwear off the line is a LONG jump to being a pedo. what possible connection can there be between a weirdo taking an adult womens underwear and them being sexually attracted to children? thats right there isn't. it's same bogus thinking that links homosexuals to pedo. and that crap has been debunked for decades.
oh and as for your "it's about protection" argument, yeah they will take your liberty all the while softly whisphering in your ear "it's for your protection"
This is absolute bullshit. There has been absolutly no research to determine if an 18 year old who has sex with a 17 year old classmate, or a guy streaking as part of a college fraternity prank, or a guy who has consentual sex with other adult men in a public-park lavatory, or the couple who park up on "lovers lane" to have sex, or a married couple who has oral sex in Arkansas, or the 90% of "sex offenders" who never did anything that wouldn't be legal or a misdemeanor if they where only done in San Fransico or Amsterdam, are likely to do anything!
Only a tiny fraction of the people who are being branded second class citizens for life, and being subjected to a lifetime of harrasment and violence at the hands of vigilantes, did anything remotely like rape or molestation. Most commited only voluntary, consentual sex acts with people their own age.
Sex offender lists, and their sister paranoia law enforcement, Do Not Fly list, are part of our societies current irrational, paranoid, fear of boogie men - being afraid of sex offenders or terrorists depending on where you live and your political beliefs. Personally, I am far more disturbed by the people who believe their friends or neighbors are all devious sexual preditors lurking to rape their kids - If anything I would be far more worried about the guy who is constantly paranoid of sex offenders (ala Mark Foley), than I would the college football players who get arrested doing a panty raid on the girls sorority. Or I would be far more frightened of the people who think everyone named "Mohammed" may be a terrorist, than I would be of someone named "Mohammed" sitting next to me on a plane.
Awesome. Let's book kids who sneak some booze when they're underage with the same charge as heroin dealers. They're probably just building up the courage to do something more serious. Of course, there's always the whacky notion that the punishment should fit the crime that was actually committed rather than what we think they might do in the future.
Maybe we should start classifying adulterers as sex offenders too? So someone who steals a magazine (or an online porn account) for the purpose of getting a sexual thrill should be classified as a sex offender?
Oh is it only because the victim felt violated? What if a mugger looks "strangely" at a lady after taking her purse and other valuables (ID, camera phone etc) but lets her go, and she feels violated? Should the mugger be classified as a sex offender too?
That's because stealing panties is a classic sign of a real sex offender getting up the courage to do something more serious.
Says who? You? Heck, why don't we start arresting people for thought crimes, then?
In a nation of laws, people get punished for what they actually do, not for some prediction of what they might or might not do in the future. Apparently, you prefer to live in a totalitarian nation, in which the state can charge anybody with absolutely anything if they just so please.
As it may be, the people in charge of budgetary approval for the programs which put all of these RFID solutions
into place will steadfastly deny that anything is wrong until they are forced to do so, as agreeing that those are
potentially high security risks would otherwise equate it with having to backtrack on what they previously approved,
even though they were amply forewarned by many in the security-related field.
It's really about not losing face at any cost, lest people start questioning other methods they employ.
Human nature, really. Look no further than the voting machines controversy for parallels here in the US.
The Open Rights Group [openrightsgroup.org](Think UK EFF) have a wiki page that provideds more information on this an othere issues with the British Biometric Passport [openrightsgroup.org]
The European version of the biometric passport is planned to have digital imaging and fingerprint scan biometrics placed on the Radio Frequency chip. The government of UK thinks that the public has a negative opinion of RFID chips so instead they call it a contactless chip.
There is a huge difference between "RFID chips" and "contactless smart cards"! They both use the same frequency band and similar communication protocols, but RFID chips have no crypto while contactless smart cards have all the AES, MAC, etc. stuff plus secure filesystem storage. There is a huge difference, I keep posting this but nobody seems to get the point: the walmart RFID chips have zero crypto, but the passport, payment cards have a ton of crypto. You can't just dump their contents
Most modern passports have an OCR section now on the ID page (and this is a condition of visa-less entry into the US now). All international passports cary the main data in Latin characters as well as the original Cyrillic, Arabic. Hebrew or whatever. Technically this is a French transliteration, which may actually be a slightly different to the English.
How is this different than Xeroxing a 2D barcode? Isn't that why there's biometric data on the passport and a digitally encoded photo - to render it useless even when cloned? Not to mention that the passport # *could* key to a database with the same data for verification purposes - the database should also contain records of passport #'s invalidated due to theft, cloning, or whatever. The data on the RFID chip is *meant* to be read. Rerecording the bitstream is a trivial exercise.
Passports and other pieces of identification never bring a nation security or safety.
Ok, but the fact is that we *already* have a lot of pissed-off people wanting to fuck the "West" in any way they can. We do want to prevent them from entering our countries and doing harm. Far better to stop them at the borders rather than enacting Draconian *internal* security measures to protect against terrorism. And, BTW, there's already a database of passport data (at least in the US) - even in the 80s when I was
"It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."
I think it's time someone cloned his passport and got busted importing drugs or weaponry or child porn or similar while on that passport. Hell, he's probably got a diplomatic passport == no search. Pure gold to anyone wanting to move anything *really* profitable.
The proper response to that spokesman is "Well then, you won't mind lending us your passport for a minute, so we can copy it and put copies on sale in <district with notorious reputation>, will you?".
Some politicians simply need the problem made their personal problem before they'll see it.
Many people here seem to make claims on RFID security without knowledge of the technology actually used. I have done some research on the subject so I think I can give some pointers. Details about the technology can be found at ICAO's web page [icao.int] and short presentation on the subject
Jacobs/Wichers Schreur [utwente.nl].
The communication between the password and the reader is encrypted using information in the Machine Readable Zone at the bottom of the passport. This is the basic way to authorize passport reading. The MRZ-information is generated from the information of the passport holder and random numbers. If bad numbering scheme [whatthehack.org] is used, breaking the encryption is quite possible. If large enough random numbers are used, breaking the encryption with brute force is currently not practical.
The authentication is done using public key cryptography. Currently only Passive Authentication is mandatory, but Active Authentiacation is supported and it is mandatory when fingerprint information is contained in the passport. With only Passive Authentication cloning of MRZ-compromized passport is easy, but with Active Authentication it should be unfeasibly difficult.
Reading and cloning an European RFID passport which is using all available security measures (like the e-passports in Finland) is not as trivia as many people here seem to think. As long as there are no backdoors in the cryptography (e.g. for the intelligence agencies) I think the technology is quite sound. Not using all available cryptography is just bad choise by the goverment issuing the passports.
The scheme in TFA is nothing new and nothing revolutionary. If you have physical access to a passport with only Passive Authentication cloning is trivial, as pointed in TFA. This is actually how the technology was designed to work. Maybe the design is bad, but that is hardly big suprise, since the technology is compromize between many organizations and goverments. When someone clones a passport which has Active Authentication, then that is real news.
It's a scary world when those who are old and have little clue about technology (the politicians) are told they need a high tech solution to a security issue.
Careful. The hippies used to complain about how all the old farts in power didn't have a clue back then. Now they're running things, and look where we are. I shudder to think about what the world will be like when it's YOUR turn...
Well, the key needs to be printed somewhere on the passport.
The big, huge security hole though, is that the key is made up of the passport number, the date of birth of the holder, and the expiry date, none of which are hard to come by. For example, the postman delivering your new passport can probably find your date of birth (when did you late get a birthday card?), and can make a pretty good guess as to when it expires (10 years plus or minus a few days), so if he can guess what the passport number is,
Why not make the key some random digit string, printed inside the passport in machine-readable text? Then it would at least be impossible to read the passport without opening it.
Off the top of my head (might be missing something obvious), by forcing the key to be made up of useful data, it becomes impossible to divorce the key from the holder's identifying information, as printed on the passport. By requiring the operator to enter the user's data as part of the key to decode the electronic data, it sort
RFID IDs are TERRIBLE for personal security, because it adds RANGE to detection and forgery. Parent post has ABSOLUTELY missed the point.
No one is claiming that magnetic stripes and/or bar codes are bad for security. In both cases they make it very marginally harder to copy and virtually eliminate data-entry errors. RFID has a BIG problem beyond that: It can be read without the knowledge of the holder.
No one can read the inside of my paper passport without me giving it to them - nor my magstripe nor bar code. I have complete control over who sees it. Sure, I might be conned into showing someone, but they have to con me. RFID means that:
1. They can copy my information without me ever showing it to them. 2. They can READ my information without me ever showing them, allowing them to identify me from a distance. 3. Even with a perfectly random RFID system, they can identify your nationality from afar, which obviously may make you a target in some circumstances.
To be SAFE, an RFID system must have a) zero emissions in the closed state (eg a tested foil cover) AND b) No non-random information broadcast from the chip. (that is, a random passportID that is broadcast that has NO other information until you look it up in the appropriate database.)
"b" is necessary because "a" alone still allows someone nearby you to snoop whenever you have to show your passport somewhere.
RFID in general could have even worse implications. Just picture the following:
- That person is carrying a passport
- Someone with a passport is probably a tourist
- A tourist would normally need to carry largish amounts of cash
- So lets mug them or double our prices.
If you're a tourist in another country, the LAST thing you would normally want to do is advertise that fact.
I'm sorry, but you'd have to be a pretty pathetic mugger if you can't spot a foreign tourist without using a bunch of fancy electronic equipment. Why back in my day...
There is a serious misunderstanding of the technology, yes even among slashdot users. The problem is that the media and slashdot refer generically to 'rfid' when they talk about two different things:
1) Simple RFID chips that can be scan and read by anyone 2) Contactless smart cards (ISO 14443 etc), with crypto
Both use the same frequency band and similar hardware, but they are different beasts: one has crypto and the other doth not.
Identity information can be put on a contactless smart card but depending on how it is implemented (hopefully securely) you probably will NEED A KEY otherwise the crypto will prevent access. Take a wireless payment card or credit card (#2 category) for example. You can't just read/dump the bank account numbers on it. There is a crypto protecting the data.
On the other hand, walmart uses the non-crypto rfid chips. Yes you can just read the info on them, there is no encryption.
So when you say "RFID is terrible for personal security" you're right, RFID (#1 above) is completely inappropriate for privacy. But contactless smart cards (#2 above) is totally appropriate, and the passports use #2
Except that you can use #2 with no crypto or bad crypto as well. Which is exactly what the epassports are doing. They have such bad keys that it is easy to brute-force crack them open in a couple of minutes. Most well-designed systems using the same standard have non-trivial keys, which makes them a lot more secure than the ICAO epassport standard.
The fun thing is that the moment the standard was created, everyone said that this is going to be a field day for the press when the first researcher figures out that the keys are so weak. The day has arrived:)
In reality the issue is blown out of proportion: the epassport is not that much of a privacy issue. Tourists can be spotted by a mile away by simply the way that they look and walk, and the smart tourist will leave the passport in the hotel safe anyway, carrying only a photocopy with him. You are in far more trouble if your passport gets stolen than if it gets copied: if you do not have your passport, dealing with any authorities in a strange country is going to be a problem, whereas if your passport gets copied, you still have the original.
Also, forging a passport is no easier than before - in fact, getting the digital and the physical passport data to match becomes a lot harder with the epassports. Reading something does not mean you can change it and write it back, as surely is well understood by anyone familiar with digital signatures.
Sure it makes things wildly insecure. You know lazy tired TSA workers will only glance at the passport and just trust what the display says. The usefulness works like this... I'm an evil terrorist, I know I can't get on planes.... I can remotely grab another passengers RFID tag in line at the boarding pass counter with a ticket on same flight I wish to perform evil deeds... even easier than pickpocketing!! Now I get THEIR pass info, forge my hacked RFID chip with their passport ID...it doesn't have to be
Well then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well then, (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't the whole point of a secure passport to secure the identity of an individual? If the identity is not secure, we may as well not waste the time or money.
Parent
Tin foil hats, everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Such ID numbers already exist (Score:4, Insightful)
Your birth certificate number could be read as CN.DN.cert-number. You have a social insurance number, social security number, or equivalent. You are numbered by your driver's license, your chequing account, your power bill, and a host of other unique identifiers.
I have no objection to SECURE identification. I object to wasting billions on useless crap.
Parent
Yes, but not co-ordinated like this (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, governments have databases about the citizens of their countries, for tax purposes, medical purposes, driver licensing and so on. That in itself is not unreasonable, as long as the data collected is necessary for the purpose, properly and securely handled, with suitable checks made on those with access to it and confidentiality maintained.
The National Identity Register in the UK, however, will combine most of the existing government databases into a single, centralised point of failure. In practice, it will likely be the case that most government departments and many outside agencies will have access to all of the records about an individual, not just those they have reason to see.
A second major concern is that the NIR will track every time it is checked. That won't help with the identity theft problem that follows from the above, unless the security of access is near-perfect across many thousands of people with access to the database. It will, however, mean that once the national ID card becomes the "easy option" for identity verification, the government has a handy record of each citizen's entire life: where they shop, which financial services they've been using, jobs they've been applying for, where they've travelled and who with, etc. There is simply no need for any state organisation to keep this sort of information about any citizen, other than when conducting legitimate surveillance of a suspect for genuine security purposes, with independent oversight.
Identity thieves, however, already happy to be part of the fastest-growing and most profitable crime wave in recent history, have hit the jackpot. Just along the Slashdot front page from this story as I write this, there is another article estimating that 100 million personal information leaks have occurred within the past couple of years or so. If that combination isn't reason enough to stop the NIR plans right now, I don't know what kind of sanity prevails in the government's universe.
Parent
Re:Well then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Stronger than that, the data on the chip is digitally signed, so even if you can tracelessly replace the chip in the passport with a different one that has the photo you want, you're not going to be able to generate the appropriate digital signature for the altered data. This technology makes the passports effectively unalterable, as long as the chip is intact.
Not exactly. To read the passport data you have to have the authentication key. To get the authentication key, you need to have the passport, because the data that the key is derived from is printed inside. Note, however, that it has been shown that a large enough portion of the printed data is guessable, given basic information like the passport holder's name and a guess at his or her age, that the rest can be brute-forced pretty quickly. So there *is* a possibility it could be read without the owner's knowledge, but it's not completely trivial and does require some additional information.
The US has addressed this issue by putting a shielding mesh in the passport cover, which isolates the chip when the cover is closed.
Parent
Re:Well then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like it is hard to see why anyone would want to blow up an aircraft? I think that people are still thinking within the sandbox and not realising that the real risk is what we have not yet thought of. There will be lots of reasons to want to access the information and to change it or learn to create false IDs that Joe Average security assumes to be valid because it is state of the art.
Parent
Re:Well then, (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a common failure that occurs in these scenarios.
As part of my research on driver's licensing issues, when states added photos to driver's licenses (starting in the late 60's) the word "fraud" never entered the picture. Driver's licenses were essentially fraud free documents before the photographs were added--so it really never entered anyone's mind that things would change once the document became more powerful/useful/trusted.
Parent
Re:Well then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Passport cloning isn't even the primary security concern here. Cloning a passport has become no harder or easier thanks to RFID. But Identity theft will become much much easier.
Parent
Can I zap it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Couldn't one kill the RFID chip by putting the passport in a microwave oven for a minute?
I can't imagine the rubber-stamper at immigration control not letting me through because he can't read my RFID tag... I'm sure a good percentage of non-zapped passports would fail to scan for one reason or another. If enough people did it, then they justn wouldn't be able to rely on them, period.
Parent
Re:Can I zap it? (Score:5, Interesting)
You make the invalid assumption that people at immigration desks are reasonable people - they are *not*. Some of them are little Hitlers with bad attitude, and the ones who aren't have their hands tied by the law - they have no discretion at all. If the law says you can't enter without a working chip, the immigration officer (even the world's friendliest and most reasonable one) has no choice but to deport you. Just as they would deport you if your passport photo was mutilated.
(I'll make one exception for the little Hitlers - one notable aberration is Houston's immigration desks - those people are polite and make you feel welcome to the United States - truly refreshing to get to an immigration desk where it isn't just stony faces and demands to see that you have a return plane ticket. I frequently travel through Houston and they've always had good people there. Dallas Ft.Worth on the other hand - I will never travel through that airport again).
Parent
Re:Can I zap it? (Score:4, Insightful)
What will happen if my Electronic passport fails at a port-of-entry?
The chip in the passport is just one of the many security features of the new passport. If the chip fails, the passport remains a valid travel document until its expiration date. The bearer will continue to processed by the port-of-entry officer as if he/she had a passport without a chip.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. It's pretty good security. It does have one flaw, that there's not enough entropy in the MRID (the info printed on the inside that is needed to authenticate to the chip) which makes brute force searches too easy, but if that flaw were fixed, I would call it very good security.
Re:Then why put it on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something is just wrong with the UK's Home Office. Today I read that they will now classify panty theifs as sex offenders [sundaymirror.co.uk], receiving the same long-term classification on the sex offenders' registry as child abusers, rapists, and child pornographers.
and if your name is written on said panties (Score:3, Funny)
Re:and if your name is written on said panties (Score:5, Funny)
ob Simpsons:
Skinner: Oh, it's a miracle no one was hurt.
Otto: I stand on my record - fifteen crashes and not a single fatality!
Lou: Let's see your license, pal.
Otto: No can do. Never got one. But, if you need proof of my identity, I wrote my name on my underwear... Oh wait, these aren't mine!
Skinner: Well that tears it! Until you get a license and wear your own underwear, mister, you are suspended without pay!
Parent
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:5, Funny)
Thank God stealing a bra is still ok...I was worried for a second there.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a tiny fraction of the people who are being branded second class citizens for life, and being subjected to a lifetime of harrasment and violence at the hands of vigilantes, did anything remotely like rape or molestation. Most commited only voluntary, consentual sex acts with people their own age.
Sex offender lists, and their sister paranoia law enforcement, Do Not Fly list, are part of our societies current irrational, paranoid, fear of boogie men - being afraid of sex offenders or terrorists depending on where you live and your political beliefs. Personally, I am far more disturbed by the people who believe their friends or neighbors are all devious sexual preditors lurking to rape their kids - If anything I would be far more worried about the guy who is constantly paranoid of sex offenders (ala Mark Foley), than I would the college football players who get arrested doing a panty raid on the girls sorority. Or I would be far more frightened of the people who think everyone named "Mohammed" may be a terrorist, than I would be of someone named "Mohammed" sitting next to me on a plane.
Maybe read Author Miller's "The Crucible" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible [wikipedia.org] ) to get a good idea of the sort of Moral Panic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic [wikipedia.org] ) our society is in today.
Parent
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So someone who steals a magazine (or an online porn account) for the purpose of getting a sexual thrill should be classified as a sex offender?
Oh is it only because the victim felt violated? What if a mugger looks "strangely" at a lady after taking her purse and other valuables (ID, camera phone etc) but lets her go, and she feels violated? Should the mugger be classified as a sex offender too?
Or what if the mugger got a sexual thrill out of
Re:Was the Home Office spokesman an idiot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Says who? You? Heck, why don't we start arresting people for thought crimes, then?
In a nation of laws, people get punished for what they actually do, not for some prediction of what they might or might not do in the future. Apparently, you prefer to live in a totalitarian nation, in which the state can charge anybody with absolutely anything if they just so please.
Parent
In other news, bureaucrats develop sentience (Score:5, Insightful)
into place will steadfastly deny that anything is wrong until they are forced to do so, as agreeing that those are
potentially high security risks would otherwise equate it with having to backtrack on what they previously approved,
even though they were amply forewarned by many in the security-related field.
It's really about not losing face at any cost, lest people start questioning other methods they employ.
Human nature, really. Look no further than the voting machines controversy for parallels here in the US.
Z.
At least they can publish this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.
How long would it take for some 3 letter agency to show up at their door in the US?
Open Rights Group - Biometric passport (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a huge difference, I keep posting this but nobody seems to get the point: the walmart RFID chips have zero crypto, but the passport, payment cards have a ton of crypto. You can't just dump their contents
The government calls
huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If no one would want to access that information, then why is it on the chip? Why even bother with the chip? Why even bother with the information?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And the problem is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheers,
-b.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, but the fact is that we *already* have a lot of pissed-off people wanting to fuck the "West" in any way they can. We do want to prevent them from entering our countries and doing harm. Far better to stop them at the borders rather than enacting Draconian *internal* security measures to protect against terrorism. And, BTW, there's already a database of passport data (at least in the US) - even in the 80s when I was
The Solution is Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
why indeed? (Score:3, Insightful)
a simple way to correct cluelessness (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's time someone cloned his passport and got busted importing drugs or weaponry or child porn or similar while on that passport. Hell, he's probably got a diplomatic passport == no search. Pure gold to anyone wanting to move anything *really* profitable.
The proper response is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The proper response to that spokesman is "Well then, you won't mind lending us your passport for a minute, so we can copy it and put copies on sale in <district with notorious reputation>, will you?".
Some politicians simply need the problem made their personal problem before they'll see it.
The technology used (Score:4, Informative)
Many people here seem to make claims on RFID security without knowledge of the technology actually used. I have done some research on the subject so I think I can give some pointers. Details about the technology can be found at ICAO's web page [icao.int] and short presentation on the subject Jacobs/Wichers Schreur [utwente.nl].
The communication between the password and the reader is encrypted using information in the Machine Readable Zone at the bottom of the passport. This is the basic way to authorize passport reading. The MRZ-information is generated from the information of the passport holder and random numbers. If bad numbering scheme [whatthehack.org] is used, breaking the encryption is quite possible. If large enough random numbers are used, breaking the encryption with brute force is currently not practical.
The authentication is done using public key cryptography. Currently only Passive Authentication is mandatory, but Active Authentiacation is supported and it is mandatory when fingerprint information is contained in the passport. With only Passive Authentication cloning of MRZ-compromized passport is easy, but with Active Authentication it should be unfeasibly difficult.
Reading and cloning an European RFID passport which is using all available security measures (like the e-passports in Finland) is not as trivia as many people here seem to think. As long as there are no backdoors in the cryptography (e.g. for the intelligence agencies) I think the technology is quite sound. Not using all available cryptography is just bad choise by the goverment issuing the passports.
The scheme in TFA is nothing new and nothing revolutionary. If you have physical access to a passport with only Passive Authentication cloning is trivial, as pointed in TFA. This is actually how the technology was designed to work. Maybe the design is bad, but that is hardly big suprise, since the technology is compromize between many organizations and goverments. When someone clones a passport which has Active Authentication, then that is real news.
Re:completely ignores the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Careful. The hippies used to complain about how all the old farts in power didn't have a clue back then. Now they're running things, and look where we are. I shudder to think about what the world will be like when it's YOUR turn...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, the key needs to be printed somewhere on the passport.
The big, huge security hole though, is that the key is made up of the passport number, the date of birth of the holder, and the expiry date, none of which are hard to come by. For example, the postman delivering your new passport can probably find your date of birth (when did you late get a birthday card?), and can make a pretty good guess as to when it expires (10 years plus or minus a few days), so if he can guess what the passport number is,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Off the top of my head (might be missing something obvious), by forcing the key to be made up of useful data, it becomes impossible to divorce the key from the holder's identifying information, as printed on the passport. By requiring the operator to enter the user's data as part of the key to decode the electronic data, it sort
and at best you'll end up with thousands (Score:3, Insightful)
RFID is absolutely TERRIBLE for security (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is claiming that magnetic stripes and/or bar codes are bad for security. In both cases they make it very marginally harder to copy and virtually eliminate data-entry errors. RFID has a BIG problem beyond that: It can be read without the knowledge of the holder.
No one can read the inside of my paper passport without me giving it to them - nor my magstripe nor bar code. I have complete control over who sees it. Sure, I might be conned into showing someone, but they have to con me. RFID means that:
1. They can copy my information without me ever showing it to them.
2. They can READ my information without me ever showing them, allowing them to identify me from a distance.
3. Even with a perfectly random RFID system, they can identify your nationality from afar, which obviously may make you a target in some circumstances.
To be SAFE, an RFID system must have a) zero emissions in the closed state (eg a tested foil cover) AND b) No non-random information broadcast from the chip. (that is, a random passportID that is broadcast that has NO other information until you look it up in the appropriate database.)
"b" is necessary because "a" alone still allows someone nearby you to snoop whenever you have to show your passport somewhere.
Parent
Re:RFID is absolutely TERRIBLE for security (Score:4, Insightful)
- That person is carrying a passport
- Someone with a passport is probably a tourist
- A tourist would normally need to carry largish amounts of cash
- So lets mug them or double our prices.
If you're a tourist in another country, the LAST thing you would normally want to do is advertise that fact.
Parent
Re:RFID is absolutely TERRIBLE for security (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:RFID is absolutely TERRIBLE for security (Score:4, Informative)
1) Simple RFID chips that can be scan and read by anyone
2) Contactless smart cards (ISO 14443 etc), with crypto
Both use the same frequency band and similar hardware, but they are different beasts: one has crypto and the other doth not.
Identity information can be put on a contactless smart card but depending on how it is implemented (hopefully securely) you probably will NEED A KEY otherwise the crypto will prevent access. Take a wireless payment card or credit card (#2 category) for example. You can't just read/dump the bank account numbers on it. There is a crypto protecting the data.
On the other hand, walmart uses the non-crypto rfid chips. Yes you can just read the info on them, there is no encryption.
So when you say "RFID is terrible for personal security" you're right, RFID (#1 above) is completely inappropriate for privacy. But contactless smart cards (#2 above) is totally appropriate, and the passports use #2
Parent
Re:RFID is absolutely TERRIBLE for security (Score:4, Interesting)
The fun thing is that the moment the standard was created, everyone said that this is going to be a field day for the press when the first researcher figures out that the keys are so weak. The day has arrived
In reality the issue is blown out of proportion: the epassport is not that much of a privacy issue. Tourists can be spotted by a mile away by simply the way that they look and walk, and the smart tourist will leave the passport in the hotel safe anyway, carrying only a photocopy with him. You are in far more trouble if your passport gets stolen than if it gets copied: if you do not have your passport, dealing with any authorities in a strange country is going to be a problem, whereas if your passport gets copied, you still have the original.
Also, forging a passport is no easier than before - in fact, getting the digital and the physical passport data to match becomes a lot harder with the epassports. Reading something does not mean you can change it and write it back, as surely is well understood by anyone familiar with digital signatures.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Google is your friend.
http://www.google.com/search?q=passport+faraday+c
- Roach