ID cards to double U.K. passport fees
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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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PM appears to contradict himself in Commons over whether identity cards will be compulsory
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Let's walk quietly away from this impending disaster The UK ID card project suffered another serious blow today with news that two potential suppliers have pulled out of the procurement process.â¦
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Microsoft Passport Dumped By Ebay  Microsoftâs technology for identity-management on the Internet in the form of Passport took another major beating today when eBay announced that they are discontinuing their support for it. Users of eBay would not be able to use their Passport Ids to login to eBay starting late ...
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Plans for a new compulsory ID card scheme are unveiled during the Queen's Speech.
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Still horribly intrusive, though A Home Office minister has said the cost of the proposed ID card could be dramatically reduced if the government used its existing databases as a foundation for the scheme.â¦
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Home Office research reveals all British people are maintaining steady levels of disbelief over goverment claims about ID cards, according to official Home Office research.â¦
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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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Rules doubling the passenger duty people must pay when taking flights from the UK have come into force.
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Swaps Big Brother for fraternal triumvirate The UK government has ditched plans to put all our identities on one big database, saying that sticking with existing systems will help cut fraud and save money.â¦
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UK.gov's own facebook The Passport Office has stopped 600 fraudulent passport applications using a facial recognition system it rolled out as a pilot across its fraud units last year.â¦
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While making love to his car Letters Before we kick off this week's musings, a couple more thoughts on the UK's plans to scrap the mooted ID card for youths.â¦
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Immigrants applying to become citizens or permanent residents of the United States may have to pay higher application fees, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
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Most Britons are taking precautions against identity fraud, a new survey has found.
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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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Another no-change rule change? Analysis Immigration Minister Liam Byrne is to celebrate the first wave of the ID card rollout next year with a scary ad campaign threatening employers of illegal immigrants with fines of Â£10,000 per offence and up to two years in prison. But even by the low standards of the Home Office, "the biggest shake-up of the immigration system for 40 years" promises to be impressively toothless - if Byrne is depending on the fine income for the 2009 New Year party, he will be a disappointed man.â¦
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Banks aren't moving fast enough on requiring online customers to provide two forms of ID, the company says.