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RFID Cards to Include Tin Foil Hats?
An anonymous reader writes "The tinfoil hat finally gains government approval. From the story: 'Wrap an RFID chip [of the US passport] inside a Faraday cage, and the electromagnetic waves from the chip reader can't get in and activate the chip. The State Department says it may use the principle to give travelers an added sense of security. No, there won't be rolls of aluminum foil included with every passport. Instead, the passport cover may include a network of wires woven into the fabric. Fold the passport shut, and there's your Faraday cage. Even Schneier agrees that a properly shielded passport cover should solve the problem. He wonders why this wasn't included in the original plans for the new passports. 'It took a bunch of criticism before they even mentioned it,' Schneier said. And he hopes the anti-snooping technology is thoroughly tested before the new passports are introduced next spring.'" We've also seen this suggested in the past.
Every neek and gerd should have some Mu metal which offers superb shielding of the magnetic component of the EMF. And at the close range of typical detectors it is the magnetic component which needs the shielding the most.
A number (of the set of natural numbers) of people are concerned about randoms reading their info. I'm a little more concerned about who can _write_ to these things. Consider broadcasting instructions to write bogus information so that the whole airport appears to be the same person, with string of criminal charges.
At least we'll all be a whooooole lot safer than if we were to say, destroy all nuclear weapons and stop going to war with each other.
This isn't a trivial concern. People with dual citizenship are at risk in some countries. If you're a citizen of country X leaving country X, you may not want the security people to know that you're carrying a US passport. You may have no choice but to carry it, but making it metallic practically guarantees that you'll have to show it to security. Of course the same thing applies if other countries use RFID tags with metallic shielding.
While I get the joke, you're wrong.
.05 meters of wavelength, or about 50 millimeters. A typical RF shield needs to block 1/4 of a wavelength, or .0125 meters, or just about half an inch.
The frequencies used by RFID at the most are 5.8GHz. That equates to about
In my book, that means about, oh, two strands per inch.
They can *tell* you that there're metal threads running through the cover, but can you know that without dismantling one? Perhaps the activation frequencies will be made public, but perhaps not. In any event, it would probably be a pain in the ass to figure it out non-destructively (try and stuff an antenna in there and keep the passport closed, then measure the intensity of the radiation that comes though? Microwave it and look for sparks or the wires to catch fire?).
Make my tinfoil hat a beanie with a propellor, please. Or maybe a fedora...
...they put metal wires in to keep others from accessing your information, big deal. How are they going to keep a thief from stealing your passport altogether?
Is there any reason it needs to be RFID and cant just be a smartcard thingo that gets plugged into the immigration guys box which then reads the data off it or whatever.
It'll be a copper mesh in the fabric. It won't set off metal detectors. There'd be a much higher chance of the average sized fly zipper have a larger detection footprint then the passport cover.
Metal detectors don't like non-ferrous metals.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't know the intimate details of what airport metal detectors are designed to pick up, but in my 400,000 miles of flying in the past five years, I've noticed that small masses of metal (wire-frame eyeglasses, small belt buckles, wristwatches, etc.) usually don't get picked up by the walk-through type of detector. I'd have to guess that there would be an even smaller mass of metal in the passport cover than these items, so there's a pretty good chance that they wouldn't be detected.
Has nobody thought about what a wonderful piece of misdirection RFID tags are? They're huge square blobs that ontain a lot of things you can obviously see, they are easily blocked or jammed and everyone knows about them. People can complain about it all they want and governments can listen and pretend to legislate, and all the while the real trackable stuff is silently glossed over. Don't you think there's smaller, more efficient tracking stuff that hasn't already been implemented? We're in 2004! An rfid tag looks like cold war technology in terms of apparant size.
Your info doesn't apply in this case. If wires are spaced 1/2" apart, one can easily picture the case where with the cover closed, the shielding wires neatly surround the chip on all sides (i.e. picture a chip with imbedded antenna, with a ground plane around the perimeter), leaving it free to radiate.
1) A passport isn't a national ID card, which appears to still be in the works. Americans still have "May I see your papers, citizen?" in their futures.
2) Even with a Faraday cover, you will still need to take your passport out and open it. The would-be data thieves will simply hang around those places...airport check-ins, Immigration desks, hotels...etc
You're using her as bait, Master!
"You want wine? May I see your ID?"
American pulls out passport.
RFID snoopers who hang out nearby restaurant frequented by foreign tourists scoop up yet another id.
The best solution is to eliminate the stupid idea that you can send and receive vital information wirelessly.
However, baring that, somehow preventing the RFID from working unless you do something explicit to make it work should be sufficient. For example, the RFID chip won't send personally identifiying information unless it has a low voltage electrical contact that you can make by pressing a specifically marked spot in the passport marked "press here to activate wireless identification".
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Naturally, I agree with the majority of people here that RFID passports are insecure, a threat to our privacy, and just generally a bad idea. However, I see a bigger problem here-- and a trend that's been growing over the past few years, at airports in America as well as in other countries. Airport security has already essentially dropped the facade of "random" checks; my male relatives (of Israeli descent, but most holding American passports) have all been interrogated/strip-searched/had the bomb squad called on them in the past few years at various airports throughout the world, for no justifiable reason. I find it pretty ridiculous that governments are spending so much money paying people to do things such as spend 2 hours detaining/interrogating a random girl (me) and doing things such as turning my violin upside down and shaking it violently, repeatedly turning my laptop on and off, etc., asking me idiotic questions ("why do you have this computer? what are you using it for?"). At any rate (sorry, got a bit off-track there), the real problem I see is this: airport security/governments in general already have such ridiculous criteria for profiling thought criminals (oh excuse me, "suspected terrorists".) It's bad enough to be detained/searched in this manner on a regular basis simply because of your ethnicity or appearance, but with RFID passports, passports containing a smartcard, etc., they can just take it one step further and start flagging "suspicious" people even more easily. Maybe I'm on the wrong track, but I really fell that the biggest threat here is not random criminals trying to steal your data or abduct you (as others have suggested); I think it's government entities with which we should be more concerned.