July 13, 2006
RFID ePassports Ready
I wrote a post awhile back called RFID Passports and the fact that they are ready and ahead of schedule poses many fears about the security of our Identity.
Imagine being overseas and your identity being available for the taking – your nationality, your name, your passport number. Everything.
The chances that RFID passports will be 100% hacker proof is very unlikely and when dealing with our personal Identity, 99.9% is not good enough. Passports are issued for 10 year spans which means that the technology that they embed into your passport will be there for 10 years and we all know how technology changes every decade….O wait, it’s every 6 months, I forgot.
In May, researchers at the University of Tel Aviv created a skimmer from electronics hobbyist kits costing less than $110. The equipment was small enough to fit into a briefcase or be disguised in any manner of luggage or clothes that could hide the 15-inch copper tube antenna.
The antenna boosts the read-range from a few inches to a few feet. To extend the range of surreptitious access much further, a second piece of equipment is needed to fake the RFID reader into sending a “read” signal, which is then relayed via radio waves to the skimmer’s reader near the targeted RFID chip.
Once this technology is cracked every American will have their identity sitting out there for everyone to see. There are skilled hackers out there who spend there time proving to the rest of us that technology may be cool, but technology also has many flaws and those flaws can turn into something more serious than a mundane detail. We are talking about the destruction of our personal information our entire human identity.
I mention the word Identity a lot because in the past 6 months, I have grown to realize how little people care about it. (Hypothetically) Think that one over while I take your Social Security Number, go kill someone and leave traces of you at the crime scene. Yea, your identity means nothing to you. (This was a fake situation used to prove a point)
For more information e-Passports: Ready or not here they come
