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Tin Foil Passports?
Daedala writes "The debate over contactless chips with biometric information in passports continues. Vendors have been chosen for testing in the U.S. and Australia. Privacy advocates are still arguing about the measure, as are security reporters and bloggers. The specs themselves are interesting, to say the least. The EETimes says that in interoperability tests, the potential chips could be read from 30 feet away. However, both they and the New York Times have published articles reporting vendors' low-cost solution: '[I]incorporate a layer of metal foil into the cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.' Don't they know that the whole tinfoil hat thing is supposed to be a joke?"
A charged layer of tin foil will block most electromagnet signals, AKA Farrady cage.
a simple layer just won't cut it, though.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
They laughed when I wore my tinfoil hat.
They tried to have me committed when I said the government was tracking me.
Now they all want to buy my sporty Faraday Cagewear (TM) line of geek clothing, made of fine woven nylon and copper wire.
Bwahahaha!
Mod me down and I shall become more trollish than you can possibly imagine!
A much better idea than my tinfoil condom turned out to be.
Christ, what was I thinking?
A tinfoil hat and a tin foiled passport. Now I just need a Farrady cage around my computer monitor so I don't have to worry about any troublesome Van Eck Phreaking.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Even if the tinfoil blocks it, there's still alot of ways that the information could be stolen with little effort. And how durable would this paper be?
With the passport shaped so there was some overlap in the edges of the cover, a nice layer of foil would shield it very nicely, thank you. Even without overlapping edges, the foil would greatly reduce the effective range.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Have been lining their purses/trenchcoats/whatever with foil for years to avoid those little tag detectors at the door.
I was watching it on TV, you saw this lady open up her purse and could see the tinfoil.. She shoved a waffle iron or some such thing in there and out she went.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Hah, if this isn't sweet sweet irony I don't know what is. One could wonder if they are laughing at this too, or doing it just for spite.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
But perhaps the joke re: tinfoil hats is that the government isn't really trying to comtrol your mind?
That in about 5 years or so they'll implement this technology and we'll see a story, "Identity Theft On The Rise As Biometrics Are Stolen From Traveller's Passports".
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
why do they need to read passports from miles away?
The whole point of the biometrics (even the lowly photography) is that you confirm the data in the passport with the person in front of you at a booth as you check everyone as they go through.
There is no reason to broadcast this info at ALL.
It's like having two computers next to each other (2 meters apart) in a "security" installation and using 2 wifi cards to link them instead of cat5.
1) it's more expensive to use wifi
2) you have no need to broadcast due to range
3) not only do you not need to, there are now a pile of security problems you have to deal with which aren't needed.
When will these fucktards learn to stop pissing taxpayers money away on "futurists" to help enslave us with at worst crappy overbearing over intrusive government leaning toward fascism, at the least they are wasting our money and enslaving us with red tape.
Tinfoil shielding? While that may work, why not just design it to be readable at a shorter range?? I mean, it can't be that hard, can it? Over-engineering strikes again...
Oh, and let me guess... I'm going to have to remove this from my person as well just to pass through the metal detector unmolester, right?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They stole my idea! I guess I should use a thicker tin-foil hat when walking around in public.
Of course the first person to steal that data would most likely be labeled a terrorist and be...disappeared.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
So now I can walk around with a real life cliche in my pocket, and use it to enter foriegn countries?
Now I just have to wait for the day that my PDA, phone and laptop can form a wireless Beowulf cluster that I can wear...
The what's wrong with cryptographic signing? Strong cryptography should have been used in passports a long time ago. The principle would be simple enough:
The name, photo and other information is hashed and then signed by the issuing authority. Airport checks are then a matter of verifying the signature. You can't forge a passport without the private key of the issuing country (which I presume they will guard closely), and modifying an existing passport will invalidate the signature.
The only tricky point here is photos: You can't scan the straight photo for the check because of all sorts of tricky alignment and scan quality issues, but that's what a chip might be useful for - it contains a hi res photo, along with the other data and signature. The hi-res photo from the chip is displayed on a terminal for the person checking the documents, along with signature verification.
Yes, you still have to have people checking photos. No, that isn't foolproof. But realistically it is as good as what we have now, with the added bonus that forged, faked, or munged passports will display as invalid due to the signature check. That's pretty damn good, especially when the resulting passport is no more invasive than what we have now.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
With airport metal detectors, if you ask me. You know most people are gonna forget to remove their *passport* before going through the scanner ... after all, what the hell would be metal in there, and most people are uneasy about letting their passports out of their possession, even just for a trip through the metal detector.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
It's one thing to get a reader to gather all my personal data, but at what distance can equipment detect the presence of one of these chips? Is the US the only country using them? I don't like the idea of walking around with a US Passport emitting signals to advertise my nationality.
Given the stupidity of some of our current leaders, and the content of your post, I wouldn't be surprised if that has already happened.
The idea is that anyone going around with a portable RFID scanner could get all sorts of fun personal info from you and potentially steal your ID. Even if it only worked from 1 foot, in a crowded airport a person walking through could scan hundreds.
The new passport is smaller, lighter, more durable and contains more information than any previous passports, however the lead carrying case kind of makes it a wash.
It depends upon what you think with.
Your proposal makes FAR too much sense to ever be implemented by a government.
The distance from which you can read an RFID chip depends almost entirely on how much power you're willing to run through your transmitter. The RFID chip is just a passive thing that runs on the correct frequency of radio waves coming in.
Anyone trying to read your passport is likely to be less concerned about damaging your kidneys than you would like.
a thin metal 'mesh' in the cover should work
Good Times email-borne virus was a joke, too.
Then Microsoft "blessed" the world with Outlook Express.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
are you suddenly faced with several billion passports that are no longer valid or what?
No, he was marked redundant because this exact same scentence was already in the post.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
I've actually seen one of these things in use during after-Christmas returns season. We were standing in the excessively long line, an' this guy comes up to one of the clothing racks. He opens up his shopping bag lined with foil and duct tape, stuffs a sweater inside, and walks off through the security gate without setting it off. Clerk was busy, it was done at an oblique angle from the security cameras, and 5 minutes later he looks just like some regular bloke walkin' the mall.
All he'd have to do after that is pull the tags and trash them, and he could pick off any store he wanted.
If you feel you need a tinfoil hat, do not use aluminum foil. Make sure you use actual tin foil. Aluminum foil hats actually broadcast your thoughts to anyone who might be attempting to... intercept.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Now someone can phish for identities by building a reciever in their car and driving around down looking for signals.
Does this strike anyone else as a bad idea?
Hmm... I see a business opportunity offering tin foil wallets for paranoid, err I mean concerned citizens.
why does tin foil not solve the issue? well in most european countries you have to hand over your passport to get a hotel room. Presto, the passport reader can work.
likewise their other solution, putting a printed password inside the passport is equally broken. Again the hotel has access to your passport pasword.
these people are dangerously a) stupid, b) in charge.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
However, both they and the New York Times have published articles reporting vendors' low-cost solution: '[I]incorporate a layer of metal foil into the cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.'
Well that's just a fantastic idea. Now I don't have to worry about someone surrepticiously snagging my personal data as long as my passport is closed. Of course, my passport isn't actually useful if I can't let someone open it.
RFID is an interesting technology with a lot of potential, but passports are a stupid, stupid application for RFID. There are much better technologies for passports. Magnetic stripes and bar codes both do the same thing RFID does, but only at close range and with the permission of the document's holder. There are some 2D bar code symbologies out there that store more than enough data for this application and which are highly redundant, therefore resistant to dirt, wear, etc. Bar codes can be read very quickly and require no contact, which means less wear on both the documents and the readers.
The main thing that RFID gives you over bar codes is the ability to read them without the document holder's knowledge, and that makes me very suspicious of anyone who insists that we must have RFID in passports, drivers licenses, etc.
Will you have to put it through the x-ray in a separate plastic bin?
My new
Comment removed based on user account deletion
a variety of switches available to control readability? You may want a slim, built-in slide-switch; but I want a big ol' single-pole-single-throw toggle switch with a huge, flip-top guard like on a missle launch console!
Why does it have to be a contactless system? I think it would be a hell of a lot more fun if my passport had a contact-based system. And it would beat this casual tapping system.
I've been tracking this for a while, so I waited to make sure I got one of the last non-RFID passports. It's valid for 10 years, and hopefully people will have solved the privacy problem by then. Hopefully.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Now that the gov't wants us to wrap our passports in tinfoil I assume that all the metal detectors that we're forced to walk through at airports will be declared redundant and we won't need to ever worry about them again?
And now you are calling it a "scentence" because you think the remark smells bad?
There really isnt anything wrong with our passports right now. It curreny isnt much of a security/privacy concern to anyone. so why would they want to make passports more convinent when it can cause these concerns?
KARMA POLICE ARREST THIS MAN HE TALKS IN MATHS- radiohead
Nope, he spelt it Farrady...
Just zap that little chip
either as a social protest, or just to convert it back to a paper-based document.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
see it here : :h ash=9238008272765e1ef64b0b64b6387930f197b900
http://www.policestate21.com/
Download it here
http://slotorrent.zapto.org:6969/stats.html?info_
And now the voting thing. Look at Ukraina - they stood up AGAINST the evil government, against corrupted Russian powers trying to unite those two countries against ones will. But noo, your too stupid and too fat to move your stupid fat ass from your "I'm watching Ophra on the couch eating McDonalds and I dont care" position.
Go grab those torrents.
installed in just about every American home:
It's called a television set.
If they insist on moving to RFID etc... Would it not be a nice solution to give people some kind of protective covering of this sort.
Maybe not necssarrilly tin foil, but something with tin foil in it to block it.
I think we here at slashdot are going to have to realize that these things are coming, no matter how badly we want to fight them and make them go away. We understand the risks involved, but perhaps instead of fighting the problem we should be looking at ways to make it less evil.
Not that we should have to, but we are a relatively small group who probably dont have active lobbyists working for us in the halls of government.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Of course one could start issuing passports with a shorter expiration time . . .but then one must get into a cost benefit analysis of replacing passports on a much more frequent timeframe . . .
If the Australian government makes it a requirement that new passports be e-passport then anyone holding them might as well walk around with T-shirts with all our passport details on them. Given their current track record on privacy you know that they'll stuff this up and make it relatively easy for someone with a high power transmitter and high gain antenna to snoop personal details.
Huh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to my 4.5 years of EE, Faraday cages work on the principal of Gauss' Law. That is, no EM field can be present inside because there is no charge inside. Wikipedia seems to agree with me.
So where does all this discussion of grounding come in? Googling for Faraday cage brings up this detailed article about building one, but it doesn't mention grounding either.
This page mentions grounding, but only in relations to the instruments, not the table. And this humorous article says grounding is only required if you have to have edges on your cage (we could design passport books so the edges are metal contacts).
I'd be more concerned with whether tin foil is a sufficient conductor for the higher frequencies.
Thats how a lot of people have stolen music, etc from mall stores, line a mall shopping bag with tin foil, and it shields the RFID chip, thus letting them get past security.
--
Tin or lead foil is not a good conductor anyway. What you need is a copper or silver foil, best if polished. Aluminum is also OK. Direction of polishing affects the conductivity.
Move over Britain, your former penal colony is attempting to usurp your position a little yip dog fawning over the big lumbering hound. I haven't seen Australia manifest one national opinion independent of the US status quo in over two years. What has happened there?
Instead of wrapping it in tin foil, it would be fun to start a company that made "rfid wrappers". The
wrappers would send a hilarious message back to the scanner like "FUCK YOU", or "THE NEW WORLD ORDER SUCKS", etc.
But then, when they actually applied the intended use of the RFID, your passport would appear invalid.
An invalid passport should be only as good as no passport at all. Your social protest would have little more success than holding you up, and then, you would need to get a new RFID-enabled passport before you could do anything for which a passport is needed, and you would be back exactly where you started.
I doubt that they are putting the RFIDs in for the hell of it; they probably actually intend to use that identification technology. However, if they don't have readers in place for identification purposes or worse, use them as a default-allow unless there is a bad reading (which would be a complete security hole if they use it as the sole form of identification and removed the human interaction aspect since you wouldn't throw any alarms, not being read, and thus wouldn't be flagged), your idea would work. If they are smart about it, however, it should not.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
A Faraday cage is a conductor, so charges are free to move inside.
When the outside is exposed to a negative charge, all the electrons 'flee', and leave a positive charge on the surface. They 'flee' to the other side of the surface, to bunch up in negative charges: that is, inside the cage. Hence exposing the inner volume of the cage to negative charges, exactly at the level of incoming negative field to be exact.
When the cage is grounded, 'fleeing' electrons are not accumulated on the other side of the surface, but rather are dissipated, leaving the inner surface of the cage perfectly neutral, and hence not exposed to electrical fields.
An example of this is Coax cables. Coaxial cables are basically a faraday cage made long. Coax cables are perfectly immune to interference *only* if the outter core is grounded. If it is not grounded, they are subject to any interference the whole system is subjected to.
Wikipedia seems to have it partially right, but not fully:
Faraday stated that the charge on a charged conductor resided only on its exterior, and had no influence on anything enclosed within it. To demonstrate this fact he built a room coated with metal foil, and allowed high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of the room. He used an electroscope to show that there was no excess electric charge on the inside of the room's walls. [Emphasis mine.]
I am fairly sure about this as a whole (about 99.995%), but unfortunately, it's been too long for me to remember the math behind it all. What my instinct tells me is that the proof by Gauss' law must have an obscure provision that is not listed in the Wiki entry either. A condition such as "all charges in the system must be within the sphere" or something of that nature.
Eddie Izzard was ever so right.
Given that the passport document is in the hands of an untrustworthy source, it seems that placing trust in the passport is a bad thing, regardless of what information is encoded and how it is stored in the passort. If I put the name "George W. Bush" in my forged passport, stored with my RFID encoded image, iris scan, and fingerprints (which I would have no difficulty obtaining), am I now trusted to be GWB?
If you're going to have biometric scanners, why not lookup the information in a networked database to determine who the person is, regardless of what piece of paper they are carrying?
Actually, if you wanted to be really clever about it and doubted the quality of tin foil (although it should be noted that most people unknowingly actually use aluminum foil), you could use a copper mesh and wrap the passport several times. Copper shielding is rather hefty.
The problem is that a shielded passport, if the RFID is applied correctly, would be an invalid passport. It therefore should do you no good since the identification methods (which should not be set to allow all until a problem comes up) should flag you for coming through without being read. Otherwise, the only ones they would likely catch are those who aren't smart enough to know how to shield their ids, which is something someone with the motive to do something would make it their business to know, thus rendering this measure ineffective. Also, if one has to remove their passport from the shielding to be read, then it is exposed (if briefly), and that invalidates the measures taken if you subscribe to the privacy concerns that someone with a reader (which you will be suprised to know are very accessible and fairly cheap for someone who stands to benefit from having one, and can actually be built practically by someone with enough know-how) could use that time to lift the information.
I am hoping that there is strong encryption involved with this implementation of RFID; not all RFID implementations are very secure and, the sad truth is, from my experience, that most are not.
This reminds me of a story I was once told by someone who did work that brought in all kinds of conspiracy nuts claiming that they were reading these people's minds. This woman came in every day with an aluminum foil hat folded on her head. Every day they would sort of shrug her off, feigning interest in what she had to say. Well, finally one day one of them decided to have a little fun with her and said "You know, we can read your mind because your little hat there isn't grounded." The next time she came by the desk, she had a chain of paperclips from the hat, dragging the ground. heh heh. Needless to say, it provided a bit of amusement for some time.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
I think you are correct. Further proof of this would be rather simple. If the cage is not grounded, and if the antenna of whatever is inside makes contact with it (or is close enough to form a hi-frequency passage via the capacitance of the gap) the cage would in effect become an extension of the antenna of the device inside.
There are other, more subtle issues. The usual textbook explanation of how a Faraday cage works assumes a static equilibrium. Fluctuating electric or electromagnetic fields will pass through the cage to some degree, depending on the frequency of the field and the construction of the cage. Grounding sometimes makes a difference in how well a cage blocks external high-frequency waves. It's not just a matter of whether the cage is grounded, but also where and how it's grounded.
In case anyone else reading this is unclear on why a Faraday cage is not a perfect barrier for non-static fields: loosely speaking, the usual analysis assumes the electrons on the surface of the metal have had time to adjust their positions so as to "cancel out" the external electric field everywhere inside the cage. If the external electric or electromagnetic fields fluctuate fast enough, the electrons will not move fast enough to completely cancel the field at all times and the signal leaks through the cage.
You're probably right, though, that an ungrounded Faraday cage would be fine for shielding a passport. I have no idea whether tinfoil would be sufficient for blocking RF though.
Furthermore, along the same line of thought, the simplest form of "disabling" the RF chip inside the passport wold be to simply "short" its antena when not in use, say a tab one has to pull out to activate the thing.
It's easy enough to think about how any technology that lets passports be read at range could be abused. How easy would it be, say, for a suicide bomber to use a portable RFID scanner to ensure that they choose a 'target rich' area in which to detonate themself? Even if the personal information was encrypted, the format of that information would probably betray the nationality of the bearer, which is certainly a characteristic plenty of unsavoury characters would want to know. Weight those risks against the complete lack of benefits and this seems a pretty dumb idea indeed.
There are some rather nice materials on the market that can keep any rfid device from being detected.
The materials vary, from resistive carbon and film laminates (super-cheap, short-lived) to to ferrite-embedded epoxies (very cheap, very hard, brittle, very long-lived) to amorphous magnetic alloys (cheap, stiff, useless-if-bent, very long-lived) to nanocrystalline magnetic metals (expensive, hard, stiff, bendable, very long-lived) to magnetic nanocystalline-embedded plastics (pricey, soft, flexible, not too long-lived).
Similar to materials used to skin the Northrop B-2 bomber, these will prevent most any rf-powered rfid device from operating and being detected and are a bit more discreet than wrapping a passport in foil like a burrito--and more durable.
They can be made to be like wallets, purses, pouches, hard cases, et cetera.
They do work on library books, SAW devices, Wiegand devices, and those Motorola RFID badges.
They also work on a wireless memory device under development--sort of a RFID device with a super-huge (4Mb++++), alterable "serial number" similar to the DalSem 1-wire stuff except that there's zero wires, read/writeable from 3.2+meters.
First of all, I agree it's unlikely that a reader could energize an ISO14443 tag from much farther than about 4 inches. It's possible to use a stronger field than allowed by local EM regulations, but with magnetic coupling antennas such as ISO14443 systems use, the field strength drops approximately with the third power of the distance, and the power needed to get that field is the square of the field strength. To read at 4 inches, a power of about 100 mW is needed. So to read at 40 inches, you would need some 10,000W, and trying to operate a reader for 400 inches would be like detonating a bomb...
So the likely scenario for reading at 30 feet would be "listening in" using a big antenna and sensitive receiver to the exchange of data between a legitimate reader that is much closer to the tag. Such an antenna could be mounted in a big suitcase, for example. As it would not transmit it would be difficult to detect.
Secondly, I can confirm that any well-conducting sheet metal covering the tag will effectively short the magnetic field of the reader, so that the tag can not be energized, there's simply no way to read it. Aluminium foil would work perfectly.
Thirdly, many ISO14443 tags contain support for public-key cryptography. The reason to include this is that the data exchange between the reader and the tag can be encrypted so if someone would be "listening in" it will be very difficult to obtain any useful information. Because of this security feature this kind of tag is often chosen for transport fare systems, access control, etc. It seems a shame not to use this, but I think the reason is that the tags should be readable worldwide, so that many readers containing the private key will have to be in existance. It would only be a matter of time before some wrongdoers get such a reader in their hands, and the private key contained in it gets out. Once an unauthorized party has the private key, the encryption will be practically useless anyway (compare this to the CSS encryption of DVD's).
My objection to this entire scheme was that it would allow random people to read my passport from a distance without my permission. If it can only be read while open, that basically takes care of this problem. Hooray!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Not everyone needs a passport, however. So the cost-benefit might be better yet. I don't know, it's late and I'm tired. Just my $0.02.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Let's clarify this real quick: I assume you are talking about the inner and outer surfaces, not the volumes.
(digging out my handy Elements of Engineering Electromagnetics, 5th Edition, Rao)
Right, this is a physical explaination of the boundary condition that says the discontinuity in the E field between the sides is equal to the amount of charge present on the conductor. However, you're forgetting to mention that our conductor in this case is a closed surface, and that surfaces are equipotential. Charges don't bunch up on one part of the inner surface, they distribute equally. And assuming the surface is closed, mathematics necessitates that all the internal E fields will cancel.
Otherwise, you would have an imbalence, and would create an E field in a region that does not contain any charge.
True, but unnecessary. The E fields are going to balance perfectly anyways, and cancel themselves out.
Ummm... not really. Assume you have a positive current on the center wire. Using the right hand rule, this creates a positively charged, cirularly symetric E wave that radiates outwards (think throwing a rock in a pond). If you pass the negative equivalent of this signal on the outer shielding, you generate an opposing E field that will directly cancel the internal one. Again, you don't have to ground the external shielding.
Of course, this is all theoretical. As someone else mentioned, the electrons can only propagate so fast, and there will be some delay. But I believe it will work well enough. I'm not sure what frequency they use for these chips, but it can't be too high for something so simple.
I'm also totally baffled by this RFID craze.
European Passport have at the lower edge a line printed with the OCR-B font which encodes all the necessary data from the passport. All border stations have a small OCR scanner to swipe passports.
This system is simple, robust, easy to verify in case of inconsistency (eg the reader reads something else than the rest of the passport shows) and quite cheap to implement both on the passport and for the reader.
To top it off, the system raises very few privacy concerns, as the content of the encoded line is the same as the human readable part and everybody can easily verify this. No secret data hidden there.
Right! But it isn't a faraday cage if you let the internal thing you are trying to protect touch the surface. You've defeated the purpose!
> Again, this is very easy to test -- just wrap
> your cell phone (or any other radio) in tin foil
> -- it will not work.
Man, you are genius! I've done it and my phone does not work! Actually you even do not have to keep it in the foil very long! I kept it for couple of minutes, took it out and tadam! phone does not work!
The UK ID card scheme proposes just this. The Government wants private sector organizations to use the ID card and the database (called the National Identity Register). So everything you do with your ID card gets tracked.
Am I the only one who is a teensy bit troubled by this proposal?
K.
You dont even have it to touch as I mentioned, a mere proximity will be enough since the gap if small enough will act as a capacitor which passes through RF. Anyhow, I didnt defeat it, since the whole insane idea of RF tags and tinfoil flaps is a product of some seriously bad crack to begin with. Just off the top of my head I can think of many ways of abusing it while at the same time I can think of many much cheaper and more secure ways such as (gasp!) cryptographic signing and barcodes to allow machine reading. Even if you insist on a chip, a traditional full-contact smart-card chip or even an optical, laser activated equivalent of the RF system if you absolutely must. This whole thing is yet another Halliburton-style boondogle/corporate-charity for the admiring corporate "backers" of the elected officials. Much as the whole "war on terror, drugs, imorrality, alcohol, name your strawman here" is.
...companies that make lead passport cases finally profit.
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
Blunkett wants to have them in British passports too. The signals transmitted will probably include nationality, though, so don't let that make you feel safer.
Mmm bet I'll be on the TSA's shit-list after posting this...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't they know that the whole tinfoil hat thing is supposed to be a joke?
That's just what they want you to think!
Wikipedia seems to agree with me.
Ha! And now Wikipedia agrees with the grandparent again.
(just kidding)
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
My mother has one of those electronic passes for the toll highway she takes to work and back. The pass comes with a metallized plastic bag into which the user is supposed to place it when she does not want the toll booth to automatically detect and charge (as in money) the pass.
I am not sure if that device uses RFID, but the basic principle is similar. The tollbooth (or store stocking, security, and possibly checkout systems, or the government's Big Brother-style citizen tracking infrastructure) detects the device at a distance and takes some action upon doing so. For various different reasons, people might want to block detection of these devices, and I'd like to know which blocking schemes work and how well.
Mom did a few experiments with her highway pass. She noticed that the way the tollbooths (both entering and leaving the highway) responded differently when she had the pass in the bag than when there was no pass in the car. So even though putting the pass into the bag did keep it from being used for that particular trip, it did not keep the highway authorities from knowing the bag was there and tracking the user's movements.
I'd really like to see reports of some tests of RFIDs and similar technologies with different shielding schemes. Does a layer of tinfoil work? Two layers? Three layers? etc. (Anything beyond 5 layers starts to get to be difficult). What other schemes work, and how well?
Of course, the DMCA might complicate this, because while I see blocking schemes as a means to protect privacy, others see it as a way to shoplift, and the RFID companies and US government will almost certainly see them as "circumvention."
Maybe somebody in Europe could do some tests...
I found this article in Wired (referenced by most of the first 60 hits in Google), but the article contains exactly what I was thinking: So... anybody know of reliable tests?
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
For fucks sake, why are they even considering wireless chips? what is the mother fucking point? if these incompetent fools are the people in charge of security then we're all screwed. Someone please explain why they are doing it this way instead of with old tried and tested smart card chips? and don't bother spouting crap about 'contacts wearing out' thats bull and you know it, i use my debit smart-card every day and it works fine, and when it does wear out ill just bloody well get off my ass and get a new one instead of being a lazy prick and having my card on offer to anyone with a reader. This is probably the same thing that fuck-face David Blunkett is going to use for our little nanny cards, it makes me sick that we live in a world full of idiots.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
They have been putting these chips into dental fillings for years...
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
While admittedly different technology (but fairly similar in nature), EZ Pass works from about 30 feet... which results much less spectacular than detonating a bomb.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Would it be possible to use both public key and strong cryptography in the same chip? I am assuming that the problem that this is supposed to solve is people entering the US under forged US passports. If that is the case you could use strong encrytion and never export a reader. You could use strong encrytion for the limited application of US rentry check and use a less safe system for other checks if the chips could handle it
I know you know this but consumer "tin foil" is aluminum. In the UK, it is made of aluminium.
- tinfoil is perfect, we use it to cover rfid tags in the lab while testing.
The problem would arise when a person's passport falls open inside their baggage in a public space, they would be under the mistaken assumption their rfid couldn't be read so they would not be watching for skimmers.
-- ted russ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/
Actually, this wouldn't be too hard to solve.
Store the private key on a central server somewhere secure (cheyenne mountain seems almost safe enough) and have the readers read the private key into memory at startup.
This would require all the readers to be networked but would solve the stolen private key scenario if it was stored in RAM.
The only issue then would be latent shadow on RAM. This wouldn't really be an issue since there wouldn't be enough of a latent image to read the key but just in case you could have the reader integrate a small LiIon battery and when it's disconnected from it's main power source write 1's and 0's to RAM.
DigitalNY
No. The EU is also discussing this, and most likely, other countries are as well.
This is also the reason why Bruce Schneier thinks terrorists will love this technology: if they want to specifically target a certain nationality (e.g. US), they can easily find people of this nationality in a crowd.
Our company has RFID security badges for going through doors. I figured I'd use the opportunity to test if aluminum foil will block the signal.
With no foil, the card will read from 20 cm. With one piece of foil on the back side, it will read from about 1cm. With the foil on the front, it will read, eventually, if you rub it right on the receiver. With foil wrapped completely around, you can't make it read.
I have no doubt that much more sensitive receivers could be built, but the foil does significantly reduce the read range.
Also, keep in mind that a reader has to transmit an RF pulse strong enough to power the chip for a fraction of a second, and the transmitted power is going to obey the inverse cube law. If the chip is shielded and the RF power pulse has to get through that, if you want to read from 20 feet away, you're going to be carrying around (or mounting if you're part of the establishment) a not-insignificantly-sized battery pack, transmitter, and directional antenna in order to get enough power cranked out to power that chip inside its foil wrap.
In fact, it may be so much power that it would be hazardous if someone stepped in front of it near the antenna.
just store the photo of the owner of the passport in it to start with so they can fix all sorts of bugs? No one would "really" care if they photo were stolen because their passport was stolen. The other detail would be the usual ones in the passport, which could be written ON the tin so it can't be read with RF
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
I seem to remember that one item of Official Defcon merchandise was an Electro Magnetically shilded wallet.
I think the original point was to have electronic versions of biometric data on the passports. Not sure what the point of making that information wireless if they still have to stamp the bloody thing every time you enter and exit a country. If you scrapped the wireless bit, you could actually use a smartcard concept to store not only info on the person, but the travel details in a much more useable form. I'm six stamps away from my third passport expansion (where they add extra pages again) - and there is nothing readable or practical about ink based entry/exit data.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
No offense, I'm an American too, or was until a few months ago, but odds are you're already broadcasting your nationality to the world. We all do, in the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we act. You don't need an electronic transmission to do this.
Recent statistics show that the vast majority of us(~85%) is strongly opposed to the use of RFID chips in drivers licenses or passports. However, our "elected" government that makes us work hard for our tax dollars is not asking our opinion but uses our money for something we don't even agree with.
Thinking about this I somehow feel the urge to write our senators and congress people to stop the RFID madness that would not be only invasive to our privacy but cost us billions.
Let's all write them and speak up about this now before it is too late, otherwise our children and grandchildren will have good reason to blame us.
When most people have these, the first opportunity will be used to make shielding reason for search and/or illegal.
EZ Pass works from about 30 feet
Because it's a powered transmitter. The RFID tags in passports would be passive.
"From the end of world War II well in to the 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department, the military services, the CIA and other agencies used prisoners, drug addicts, mental patients, college students, soldiers, even bar patrons, in a vast range of government-run experiments to test the effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense electric shocks and prolonged 'sensory deprivation.' Some of the human guinea pigs knew what they were getting into; many others did not even know they were being experimented on."
The Cold War Experiments , Budiansky, Goode and Gest,
U.S News and World Report , January 24, 1994
"Suddenly, at the close of 1993, the public was bombarded with "news" about the feeding of radioactive substances to pregnant women and mentally retarded students, about the unethical irradiation of workers, soldiers, medical patients, and prison inmates, and about the government's own internal fears that these experiments had 'a little of the Buchenwald touch.'
I am among those who persistently tried to get national media coverage of this outrageous example of government wrongdoing. To say that the media were reluctant to listen would be an understatement. The fact is that, for more than a decade, documentation was ignored and facts were misreported."
The Radiation Story No One Would Touch,
Geoffrey Sea, Columbia Journalism Review, March / April 1994
"... On December 17, 1963, Deputy Director for Plans Helms wrote a memo to the DDCI, who with the Inspector General and the Executive Director-Comptroller had opposed the covert testing. He noted two aspects of the problem: (1) 'for over a decade the Clandestine Services has had the mission of maintaining a capability for influencing human behavior;' and (2) 'testing arrangements in furtherance of this mission should be as operationally realistic and yet as controllable as possible.' Helms argued that the individuals must be 'unwitting' as this was 'the only realistic method of maintaining the capability, considering the intended operational use of materials to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting. Should the subjects of the testing not be unwitting, the program would only be 'pro forma' resulting in a 'false sense of accomplishment and readiness.' ' [Memorandum for the Record prepared by the Inspector General, 5/15/63]"
Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Behavior Modification,
Appendix A, XVII. Testing And Use Of Chemical
And Biological Agents By The Intelligence Community,
Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence,
U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1977
"Scores of new contracts have been let, and scientists, aided by government research on the 'bioeffects' of beamed energy, are searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for wavelengths that can affect human behavior."
Wonder Weapons: The Pentagon's quest for nonlethal arms is amazing. But is it smart?, archived copy
A simple layer of foil isn't going to stop Jack Schitt, but what these Jack Hasses want to do is fool the public into thinking that it does something to make everyone safe. But it doesn't do Jack Schitt. They want to know where everyone is. They'll put sensors everywhere. It's going to be very dangerous. 1984. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. We're all gonna die!!!!!
Jeez slashdot users, you still haven't found the actual protocol that is to be used? For crying out loud.
f m
/ TR-PKI %20mrtds%20ICC%20read-only%20access%20v1_1.pdf
General:
http://www.icao.int/mrtd/Home/index.c
Anti-skimming and PKI:
http://www.icao.int/mrtd/download/documents
But I'll probably be late again and this post will be ignored. No tinfoil hats necesary, if your government chooses the right protocol.
So?
You can change that you know, it is pretty easy:
Stop being an arrogant asshole who believes he has the right to do anything and everything they want.
I would think that you would use the private key to sign the passport and then the public key would be used to verify the passport. That way the private key would only need to be known when and where the passport was issued. In fact if the passport offices were all networked they could all submit the text, image and whatever else was to be verified electronicaly get and get the key back from one central location. In this configuration the readers would not have the private key. The public key is all that would be needed in all the readers.
I don't like the idea of walking around with a US Passport emitting signals to advertise my nationality.
You mean you're not proud to be American? Off to Guantanamo with you!
I don't know about your country, since I don't know where you are from, but here in the US we have a Constutional Republic type of government, with strong democratic traditions. What that means is that we have a direct vote on only a few things. Mostly, we just elect people to represent us, they then make the actual laws. It means that most things, we needn't concern ourselvs with.
Something like this would be one of those things. The Passport Authority would make the changes, it'd never need to go out for a vote. Congress might need to pass a bill for it first, but I doubt it. I think an administrative decision is all that would be needed.
We are talking about something that is win-win basically. The people who know and care about crypto would be happy, since it would honestly increase security. The rest of the population wouldn't care either way, so no problem. You aren't going to have protests from privacy advocates or anything since there is no privacy issue, it just increases security.
I meant a public, well tested crypto algorithm. However those aren't invincible. Crypto isn't proven to be strong, it's just repeatedly shown to be not weak to a certian kind of attack. Do enough of that, you can be quite confident it's strong. However math and computer science are open fields, and new thigns are being discovered all the time.
So suppose we go with a prime system like PGP. Then, some time after it's introduction, a brilliant mathematician and programmer figures out how to factor keys at blazing speed. They release a program that you feed it a public PGP key and it spits the private one out in 10 seconds.
Well if that happened, PGP, and other encryption based on primes, would now be broken. The advance in math would mean that they are no longer strong, no longer useful.
All public key crypto is venurable to this sort of thing. We believe the math to be such that there's no flaws, but that doesn't mean our knowledge of math won't advance and we'll discover one.
The only cryptography that we can be sure won't be broken is the one time pad. If you use a truly random pad, it's unbreakable, since someone can never know if they decoded it correctly or not.
I design RFID readers similar to those that would be used to read these passport tags, so I might be able to add some useful insights.
And I design high-security systems that make use of contact and contactless smart cards, so I may be able to add a bit more about how their capabilities could be used to thwart attacks.
Thirdly, many ISO14443 tags contain support for public-key cryptography. The reason to include this is that the data exchange between the reader and the tag can be encrypted so if someone would be "listening in" it will be very difficult to obtain any useful information. Because of this security feature this kind of tag is often chosen for transport fare systems, access control, etc. It seems a shame not to use this, but I think the reason is that the tags should be readable worldwide, so that many readers containing the private key will have to be in existance.
No, it's not that bad. It's pretty easy to secure these passports, actually. I understand the desire to Keep It Simple, and I'm sure that's why the issuers aren't taking the precautions they should, but, really, they should. It's not *that* bad. Allow me to explain:
There are two problems to be solved: First, you need to ensure that only authorized readers can query the passport. This is the most important requirement. Second, it's a nice thing if it's also impossible for eavesdroppers to listen in. That can actually be achieved through non-cryptologic means, since the authorities have control over the environment in which the authorized readers are deployed. It can also be accomplished cryptographically, however.
To ensure that the passport will only talk to authorized readers, the passport must be configured to require an authentication transaction before it's willing to divulge any data. In a world without public key crypto, this would be a little bit painful, but possible. With PK, it's pretty easy. Each reader should have its own key pair, with the public key signed by the owning government, whose public key is signed by a central authority, e.g. the ICAO. Each passport need only store the public key of the ICAO. With that infrastructure, the passports can verify the validity of the readers.
Of course, if a reader is lost or stolen, its key has to be invalidated, so there will need to be a mechanism to distribute revocation lists to all of the readers, and for the passports to store a list of revoked public keys. There is a window of vulnerability for any passport to be read by a stolen reader, but assuming that passports in use encounter legitimate readers often enough, that risk is manageable. Particularly if some solution (like the RF-shielded covers) is used to give the passport holder control over when his/her passport can be read.
In reality, it'll be a bit more complex that this, of course. To limit the damage of compromised root or national keys (though those should be *very* carefully protected), a periodic key rotation is probably a good idea. There are several good ways to accomplish that, but a date-based approach is probably a good idea. The passports don't know the current date, of course, but they do know that time never runs backwards so periodic exposure to legitimate passport readers can be used to keep the passports safe. Key expiration should also serve to limit the size of the revocation lists passport chips have to manage.
There are other details to consider and address, but the fact that a full exposition is beyond the scope of a slashdot post doesn't mean that this problem is really a hard one, or anything that the security community doesn't already know how to address.
Oh, as for the second problem -- preventing eavesdropping -- that problem *is* trivial. Just negotiate a shared 3DES or AES key during the authentication step, then encrypt all of the subsequent communication. The validity checks on the reader keys would prevent MITM attacks if they were even possible to begin with, and assuming the environmen
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's the part where grounding comes in: grounding essentially means connecting to a capacitor of infinite capacity (the earth), which is able to always supply you with an equal and opposite field E. The scenario you describe is a very specific one illustrating how you would shield out from one particular intensity (or function wave) of the internal E field. This is more akin to noise cancelation... it is not shielding: in shielding, you can cancel any function wave (even if it is chaotic - e.g. static noise) because of your infinite capacitor.
Again, I believe this proof we are after is based upon a provision, such as "the overall charge of the system" or something of the like. Think of grounding as having a system with infinite capacity.
PS. I will not really discuss the previous points you and I made because I was trying to simplify the situation into layman's terms. We cannot make a proof using "fleeing" charges and what not. The proof is mathematical, and I am suggesting we are missing a crucial requesite that neither of us remembers. The Coax cable thing though, I am positive of, it is without a doubt in my mind a real world application of a Faraday cage. It is also why computers and sensitive electronics need to have a ground plug: so as to avoid data corruption from stray RF fields emenating from the scooter rolling by down your street. Only two plugs (phase and neutral) are not sufficient.
Yay slashdot! on your way to Creationism!
-pVoid
Eight years ago, yes, eight years ago, I was working with the first (or was it second) generation of RFID tags. In one application at a equipment rental company the tags failed on about half of the equipment due to the type of metal. Basically the tags would not work when they were attached to or directly next to the inventory objects. They would work fine two inches away from the metal but not within that distance! This prevented the adoption of the tags by this company. They really wanted to tag ALL their equipment for inventory control puposes but physics prevented it. Needless to say they were very dissappointed as was I since the project didn't continue at that point.
What I'm wondering is if the newest generation of tags works with ALL types of metals even when attached to it or next to it?
Microwave fry it problem solved!
yes i do, thank you for watching
This is exactly what the "e-passport" from ICAO will do. The contactless smartcard is just a storage device for signed data files that include the same data as on the paper (for verification), a high resolution version of the picture, and optionally data such as seperately encrypted biometrics, visa data etc.
There are two optional extentions, one that requires the reader to prove that it optically can read the MRZ (the paper passport, in effect asking you to open the passport physically) and only then allow communication (encrypted). This is called Basic Access Control by ICAO and protects reasonably against the remote skimming everyone is so worried about. EU and Japan are pushing this option, US is not. Trouble point will be when EU and Japanese passports require Basic Access Control before giving your somewhat private data and US _border_ stations not supporting it.
The other optional extention is to add a secret key on the card and use it for authentication, to make copying (not counterfitting, that's the signatures job) more difficult.
Really the crux will be to have support of Basic Access Control on all border stations. Without that, a passport that tries to protect your data is useless to enter those countries, which is the whole purpose of a passport....
The chip supplier could merge with the ... the US administration is
.... OH NO, Bush misread the instructions
Centers of Disese Control and imbed the
chips in pinus's
90% male. Then when I go to get certified
for a flight, the TSA official will drop
paints, bend over, and I'll transfer the
"secret code" into his ass-hole in about
60 seconds, and get on the flight.
What a system, rightous so.
I can even see Bush on the day of the
new systems inaguration at Ronald Reagun
Airport to demonstrate, in person, how
easy and hygenic the new security system
works. He'll get on his nees, open his
mouth, the TSA standin official will insert
pinus
again! Why does he keep doing this, it's
the eleventh time today!
Toodles
On one hand, I agree with this, although I must say that RFID chips do not have internal power sources and would probably make it through a toss in the washing machine (people are often suprised that at electronics manufacturers, newly placed circuit boards are oftentimes run through a large, expensive, glorified dishwasher) and, because they are so small (did you know that some versions of RFID can actually be *printed* with special ink), they are quite hefty and able to withstand a lot of things thrown at them. I agree, though, that this is certainly an imperfect application and that the chips are not indestructable, and that the inconvenience caused by a failed trip would be large. It would be quite annoying to be stuck somewhere and people would indeed complain. I am by no means supporting the RFID-implanted passports and was simply commenting on how the authentication should be run. Since this is in place to make things secure, an allow-all system would certainly decrease security, and having a system that doesn't use the RFIDs at all would just be silly and inefficient. (Why have them in the first place, then?)
However, I should note regarding your comment about chips beginning to fail and people complaining that you would be suprised (or perhaps not) at how complacent people can be. For instance, credit card stripes sometimes wear down with time (after being sat on, heated up, wet, etc.) and won't swipe well. Yet credit cards are still widely used. People stomp their feet, get aggravated, then go home and call their credit card company for a new credit card. The inconvenience of some doesn't automatically mean that the end to an application. Unfortunately, at times, the inconvenience of many does not as well. If anything, that is part of the problem.
People complain about these things, but few do anything to correct it.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Thats more of an interesting threat than RFIDs on passports. You could confirm a persons ID and location. You could even turn it on without the owner knowing and spy on their conversations. Many more people carry cellphones around that passports. However the Great Poodle (Blair' UK) and other countries are considering RFID ID personal cards.
So in other words you break the tin foil seal and expose it to any possible RF reader. And the copy they make would capture any written password. Thus you proved the point.
my WAP is 15 meters (16yards?) away from my microwave, with 3 concrete walls in between. I can use my notebook in the kitchen with the microwave on, less than a meter from the microwave, and I have no signal problems.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Not all Americans are arrogant assholes, doesn't mean we don't all stand out as Americans.