Passport hack demonstrated again
The Daily Mail has demonstrated that the “proof of concept” hack of the new “secure” British passports, with their embedded chips, works in the wild. And with worrying consequences.
A shocking security gap allows the personal details and photograph in any electronic passport to be copied from the outside of the envelope in which it is delivered to homes.
The passport holder is none the wiser when it arrives because the white envelope has not been tampered with or opened.
Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.
It had been delivered in the normal way by national courier company…to a young woman in Islington, North London.
With her permission we took away the envelope containing her passport and never opened it.
By the end of the afternoon, we had stolen enough information from the passports electronic chip – including the womans photograph – to be able to clone an identical document if we had wished…
The Government says the biometric chips are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. In other words, without the MRZ key code it is impossible to steal the passport holders details if you do not have their travel document.
Yet it took us no time at all to unravel the crucial code, using a relatively simple computer software programme and a scanning device.
Now, despite the Daily Mail‘s usual anti-immigrant bias, that’s got to be a concern.
pax et bonum
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