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UK passport RFID chips cracked


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UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With £174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation — and if combined with demonstrated hacks for reading RFIDs at a distance, this could happen from across the room, or even farther. You can then clone the RFID and stick it in another passport (surprise! your identity is now owned by a terrorist!).
(Source: BoingBoing)

Brilliant! And so the ‘War On Terror’ rolls blindly on, over the bodies of 655,000 Iraqi dead and the rights and safety of Britons. Blair’s shiny new RFID passport has already been cracked.

If you read the Guardian article linked from BoingBoing, the Home Office plays down the dangers. But what they can’t deny is that information can now be sucked straight off your passport, at a distance, without you even knowing it. Listen to this genius:

“This doesn’t matter,” says a Home Office spokesman. “By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport - and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.”
(Source: The Guardian)

Hello? Are you awake? The difference is that you would know if your passport had been nicked! With RFID data theft, you’re completely unaware of any risk.

More than that: if it “doesn’t matter” that the data is stolen, why bother putting it on an RFID in the first place? Just to waste millions of our taxes?

I am so angry right now. Just like our illegal invasion of Iraq, the UK government is now herding us all in the wrong direction and won’t brook any logical criticism. We’re being forced to pay for expensive new passports which are less secure than the old ones!

Is there any end to this government’s stupidity and lunatic dis-regard for our safety?
conscious_bluemonkey

5 responses // UK passport RFID chips cracked

  • What he meant to say is "It doesn't matter, we'll still control all the aspects of life of the general population before you know it."
    cerealforeal
    1 response to this
  • I bet if they had used a teenager they would have cracked it quicker !
    recommended by  huntre
    Purdey
  • Who said they created the RFID chip? Dont forget they are just a staging ground, to take it global.
    amirct3
  • Actually, this article is more than slightly innaccurate.

    You cannot read any information from the RFID tags at any distance if the passport is covered by a material acting like a faraday cage. I don't know if they have changed the design for the passport cover, since the article dates back to 2006, but in any event you could just use a wallet made of metal mesh that will stop any attempts.

    The only way to access the information then is to have it in your possession, in which case if you have stolen it off someone then you can already see all the information you need to forge it the classic way. The only problem now is it that the assumption is that the chip hasn't been cloned so will be placed under less scrutiny when being passed through security.
    _Hayko

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