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E-Passports: Snazzy but Useless?

Fancy new electronic passports: good for when you lose them, but not all that secure, it turns out. A German security consultant has hacked the RIFD chip inside the passports about to come into use in Europe and the U.S.--and it only took him two weeks to do it. Using computer programs and passport readers which are not only legal to buy for the average citizen but readily available, he showed Wired how the passport could be manipulated to display data cloned from a different passport.

Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow at Privacy International, a U.K.-based group that opposes the use of RFID chips in passports, explains it this way:

Is this what the best and the brightest of the world could come up with? Or is this what happens when you do policy laundering and you get a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions about technologies they don't understand?"

Ouch.  Physical inspections of the passport could thwart this kind of hacking, but still, maybe going back to the drawing board on this one is a good idea. We want a new picture anyway.

[Image via lilit/Flickr]

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