IPS leak suggests ID card fingerprint chop
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Prints might just be needed for 'special' groups a key component of the UK ID card scheme, the central database of fingerprints, may be abandoned, according to a leaked Home Office document obtained by the Observer. The document doesn't suggest entirely scrapping fingerprints, but instead suggests that their value should be assessed for each group of the population enrolled.â¦
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ePassport the 'most secure passport ever' The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has completed its transition to the production of ePassports, replacing the production of traditional passports with those containing a facial biometric.â¦
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Overdue debtors beware: You may not be able to rely on Caller ID to screen out those annoying bill collectors much longer. A California entrepreneur has a plan to bring the hacker technique of Caller ID spoofing
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The United States plans to issue passports with personal data stored on radio frequency identification chips. The documents would be harder to forge, but might leave holders vulnerable to identity theft. By Ryan Singel.
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A effort by a Seattle company at Black Hat DC to demo a device that easily hacks data from a popular RFID-based ID card system has been met by a patent-infringement claim. Meanwhile, legislators attempt to wrap laws around the security issues.
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Details from chip-and-pin cards could be stolen while shoppers make purchases, scientists say.
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Just in time for the Olympics The British government is delaying the roll out of the national ID card scheme to UK citizens, according to leaked documents obtained by the Tory party.â¦
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A new digital system for identifying fingerprints is being adopted by police forces in England and Wales.
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Ziff Davis - In the aftermath of Sender ID, some are concerned that Microsoft may use its vague IP claims over basic Internet protocols against other companies and open-source developers.
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In a recent interview, privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg said it isn't clear how government agencies or companies will use the personal data that they collect via things such as identity and shopping courtesy cards.
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Tracking with a soupcon of fast... The Telegraph reveals that the UK government is plotting fingerprinting of air passengers as a matter of routine, to check the identity of departing passengers and to tighten up border controls for incoming. Which, given the firmness of the regime's plans for ID cards, is scarcely news in the long term - but in the interim, turkeys are apparently being asked to volunteer for Christmas, now.â¦
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The apparent release of searches made by hundreds of thousands of users is raising privacy concerns.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â
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CNET News.com reports today that IBM will start shipping its PCs with a new chip which stores passwords and computer&#39;s identity in silicon, making it harder for hackers to access.
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The British government is considering "coercion" tactics to force people to get biometric identity cards, according to a report to be published in a Sunday newspaper based on a leaked document.
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Â· New law heralds world's biggest biometric systemÂ· Police to share information on visa applicants
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Review Fingerprint-scanning prototype