Stan Beer
Sunday, 06 August 2006 10:29
Business IT -
Security
Passports embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips can be easily cloned and can potentially make passport holders a target for terrorists, security experts have warned at conferences this week.
The Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas has for the past week
provided fascinating insights into the security issues of commercial
technology such as Mac OS X and Windows Vista from the some of the
leading security exponents around the world.
In the latest and perhaps most disturbing presentation to date, German
researcher, Lukas Grunwald, demonstrated that he could access data from
the RFID chip embedded in his own passport and copy it to another RFID
chip embedded in a smartcard.
One of the most frightening aspects of the demonstration is that
Grunwald was able to develop the system to accomplish this task using
standard hardware, his own software, with minimal funds and in a few
short weeks.
Even more frightening, Grunwald was able to demonstrate at the
concurrent Defcon conference that the same system could also be used to
copy building access cards.
Aside from the forgery aspects, which could potentially enable
criminals to steal identities and unlawfully gain access to places
where they should not be, security experts have raised an even more
potentially serious threat posed by e-passports with embedded RFID tags
- terrorism.
RFID tags can be read wirelessly from a distance. Security specialists
have raised the spectre of strategically placed hidden RFID readers
being able to recognise passport holders in the vicinity and even what
nationality they are.