MIcrowave your passport
Aug. 5th, 2006 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lurkittyOne of the wonderful, shiny, improvement brought to you by the Department of Homeland Security is the introduction this October of radio-frequency-identification tags in your passports. Several experts in security have warned for quite some time that such devices are easily hacked, leaving citizens open to identity theft at airports.
The latest demonstration of this occurred that the Black Hat conference at Las Vegas this week, where Lukas Grunwald, a researcher with DN-systems, used a laptop with $200 RFID reader and a smartcard writer to clone his passport tag. While they could not change passport information, they could read the information at a station similar to a passport control station.
It is not currently possible to read information remotely, but it is theoretically possible to pick up a single piece of information, such as nationality, from a slightly open passport. They suggest shielding your passport with foil and only taking it out at the designated station.
Since the Germans have had trouble with their version of the RFID tag, the goverment is still accepting passports with inoperative RFID tags. The German hacker club Chaos Computer Club has come up with its own solution: microwave your passport.
So, is it tinfoil hats, or microwaves, folks?
The latest demonstration of this occurred that the Black Hat conference at Las Vegas this week, where Lukas Grunwald, a researcher with DN-systems, used a laptop with $200 RFID reader and a smartcard writer to clone his passport tag. While they could not change passport information, they could read the information at a station similar to a passport control station.
It is not currently possible to read information remotely, but it is theoretically possible to pick up a single piece of information, such as nationality, from a slightly open passport. They suggest shielding your passport with foil and only taking it out at the designated station.
Since the Germans have had trouble with their version of the RFID tag, the goverment is still accepting passports with inoperative RFID tags. The German hacker club Chaos Computer Club has come up with its own solution: microwave your passport.
So, is it tinfoil hats, or microwaves, folks?
