Re: Interesting Travel Experience

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Randall Webmail [rvh40 () insightbb com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 7:06 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: eekid () aol com
Subject: Re: [IP] Interesting Travel Experience

From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 18:00
Subject: [IP] Interesting Travel Experience
To: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>

> ________________________________________
> From: eekid () aol com [eekid () aol com]

> This raises a few questions.  Is the new passport system
> reliable?  What does it say about border security when a
> birth certificate trumps a passport?  Will my passport (the
> expensive little booklet) allow me to travel in the future?

<http://tinyurl.com/5lbnwu>

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and 
accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised 
crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could 
not be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin 
Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN 
agency that sets standards for e-passports.

The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match 
key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports 
have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it. Britain is a member but will 
not use the directory before next year. Even then, the system will be fully secure only if every e-passport country has 
joined.

[SNIP]

[[It's Security Theatre - more about Theatre than about Security.]]




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