Biometric passports go jumbo
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Super size me The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has produced a larger version of the biometric passport.â¦
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A system which allows air passengers to sign up for biometric scanning to speed up their journeys is being unveiled at London's Heathrow Airport.
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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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The UK government will store electronic records of people entering and leaving the UK in effort to tighten border control.
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Identity 2.0 company Sxip releases a new login and password management
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Germany will store digital fingerprints in addition to digital photos in passports as one of several biometric security measures.
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Â· Leaked documents show starting date of 2012  Â· Pilot plan for foreign nationals to start this year
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Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints
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Anyone for an iDcard? The Home Office has tried to frighten people into taking its identity plans seriously by publishing a marketing survey it said proved their passports were easy targets for ruthless criminals.â¦
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Strict safeguards will prevent the world's biggest biometric database from being abused, US authorities say.
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Britons visiting the US without visas will need their own machine-readable passports from Tuesday.
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Fingerprints may soon replace passwords to log on to computers and Web sites, thanks to gadgets like Microsoft's Fingerprint Reader and Lexar Media's JumpDrive TouchGuard Pro. For those with cash on hand, Rollei's throwback MiniDigi digital camera could be a collector's delight, but Sony Electronics' Cyber-shot L1 is a better investment for performance and features. And CD labeling just became easy with Primera Technology's Signature Z1 CD/DVD.
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[Business India] Los Angeles, Oct 5 : IBM has introduced a biometric notebook computer with an integrated fingerprint reader that can recognise the user of the computer, reports Xinhua.
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NEW YORK -- EBay Inc. became the latest Web site to say it will stop using Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Passport user authentication system, as Microsoft continues to scale back the service.
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The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion  project to build the world's largest computer database of  biometrics to give the U.S. government more ways to identify  people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on  Friday.
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Costs tied to the country's controversial biometric ID card plan will cause the price of new passports to soar.
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Schengen states to share visa data The European Parliament has approved draft proposals for a biometric database to prevent people who are refused a visa by one Schengen country from applying to other member states.â¦