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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?"
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.
Your proposal makes FAR too much sense to ever be implemented by a government.
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?
You could rotate the private keys based on the date issued and the suspect passports would eventualy expire.
Still not perfect, but even if the cryptographic part failed completely it would still work as well as it does now.
It would never have popular support. Many people don't have a clue about crypto and this would mean nothing to them. Look at air port screening. Everybody here knows it's bullshit but it makes the clueless feel safer. Each flight attendant would be made to hold a yellow balloon the entire flight if it made people feel safer.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
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?
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
Just zap that little chip
either as a social protest, or just to convert it back to a paper-based document.
Because how far away you can read something isn't fixed by design. They can't make the radio waves suddenly stop propagating at a certian distance. So someone could just design a bigger, more sensitive antenna and read it from further away. They also want to make it strong enough so that the legit readers can be simple and small. A shielding just solves the problem. You can't read it period, unless it's open.
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.
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."
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.