Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!!!!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.