Slashdot Mirror
British "Secure" Passports Cracked
hard-to-get-a-nickna writes "The Guardian has cracked the so-trumpeted secure British passports after 48 hours of work:
'Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?'"
Governments fail. Shocking!
Remember, kids: government intervention is good.
Global warming is a cube.
The dumb thing is that the personal information is SUPPOSED to be unencrypted - it's part of the spec. Thus, the 3DES (Ha Ha) encryption of the "hello" connection is irrelevant; though if the key really is based on public information it looks like someone really has lost the plot.
In any case, isn't 3DES being phased out because the cost of cracking it has fallen dramatically recently?
What fundamental principle of encryption are they breaking? If anything, a fundamental principle of encryption is that there can't be such a thing as a "secret key" if you're either putting it in the passport or if you're deploying it to everybody that needs to scan passports (remember DVD encryption?).
What's important is to have the data in the passport (along with the picture) digitally signed, in order to avoid tampering. The article claims that these passports are indeed signed and they didn't break the signature. Big surprise, since all they did was get a RFID reader and decrypt 3DES with the key right in front of them.
Don't see how you can... but anyway an exploit would be a problem with the reading software, not with the passports. And it could be more easily patched after deployment.
The article then presents some more valid points... but these have nothing to do with the basic encryption being broken. FUD mostly, surprise, surprise.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Is this true? I had the impression that the 911 terrorists had valid ID, but I haven't read the 911 commssion report...
Can somone point me to some information confirming or disproving this assertion?
This is because the encryption is not supposed to make the content inaccessible.
The reader at the cutoms employee's desk has to be able to read the passport data. It has to know the key.
Instead of installing a super-secret key in all readers around the world (and having to pray that it does not somehow leak out), the designers opted to use a separate key for each passport and have it printed on the passport itself, so that it can be used by the reader.
This is only intended to protect against the "reading in the metro" scenario. Not to protect against reading your own passsport using an RFID reader.
Also, many scenarios written after such discoveries assume that the readability of the data implies it can be modified to commit fraud. This is not true. The data is signed using public-key encryption, and modifications are easily detected by the reader.
It means you can get away with all sorts of stuff and then claim "It wasn't me mate", someone must have cloned my passport.
We do have some complete fuckwits in charge. Of course, we do have some complete fuckwits voting for them, so it kind of balances out. Someone care to suggest an improvement on democracy?
Deleted
FTA: "Remember, information - such as a new picture - cannot be added to a cloned chip."
I believe the missing word is "yet".
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
As usual, the RFID passport leaks information and is easy to clone.
I don't want to sound trollish, but the major force behind biometric passports worldwide is Homeland Security in USA: "You want visa free entrance to US? Make biometric passports!". Honestly, this is plain bullying.
Besides, if the border guard thinks the passport is "secure", then he'll spend less time thinking about that person and just rely on the big "OK" that pops on his screen when he swipes the thing instead of evaluating the person with his brain and guts.
TFA mentions brute-force protection. For a thing, like credit card, that can be replaced within 3-5 days, it's ok, but for a passport, that some joker "brute-forced" and now it is locked, it is really tragic, especially if You are away from home and this is Your only ID.
I think that the ID should be un-trivial to counterfeit. It should deter "common" people from tampering with it for some small, petty crimes. For well funded operations, obtaining a real passport isn't a problem - bribe the migration official and he issues You one on whatever name.
My slightly watered point is - ID should be used for "some" identification. Trust is a human thing and not machine solvable.
Heck, Your motherboard may be bugged right now by some weird conspiracy and no matter what security measures You take, such as bug sweeps or cable checks, You're screwed already since CIA and NSA and Mossad altered the CPU. It's a human thing.
Lone Gunmen crew.
And Again, We the british Public ask, what exactly have we gained from being forced to pay over our hard earned cash for these cards?
You need to read printed details to get access to the RFID. Sure, you can pick-pocket the passport, read what you need and then clone the RFID - but then you could just pick-pocket an old fashioned passport and spy-camera the page. But I can't pwn your life just by standing next to you on the tube.
RFID's coming whether you tinfoil types like it or not. Why not start a business manufacturing Faraday-cage passport holders or something?
Oh, how I hate this kind of spin: "This doesn't matter," says a Home Office spokesman. "By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport."
It matters a great deal because what they said couldn't be done can be done.
It transpired a couple of years ago that some models of the expensive Kryptonite bicycle lock could be opened with a BIC pen. The Kryptonite company could have spun this by saying "This doesn't matter, because the security expert who demonstrated this didn't really steal the bicycle, and bicycle owners actually keep their valuables in their safe deposit boxes."
What the Kryptonite company really did was acknowledge that this was a serious problem and recalled all the locks.
Would that the UK government addressed the security problem instead of the PR problem.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
1. I don't understand why they use RFID. If you are not supposed to read it from further than two centimeters then why not use a contact chip (smartcard) ? It would be as practical to read and you would be sure that no one could read it without your knowledge. 2. The argument in the article that goes "if you can read it you can clone it" it completely bogus and make them sound like idiots. Have they never heard of challenge-request authentication ? The basic idea is that the reader authenticates the chip to ensure it is not a forged one. To do this you have a shared secret in both the chip and the reader. The reader then sends a random challenge to the chip, which encrypts it with the secret and send the result back. The reader does the same operation and compares the result. If it matches it considers that the chip knows the secret and is thus original.
The key idea then is that the chip never sends the secret directly, so a cloner could never guess it, even if it could issue an unlimited number of challenges to the original chip. And without the secret, it cannot produce a clone that would authenticate.
So in short to clone the chip you need more than the chip, you need to compromise the manufacturer of the system to get the secret.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
May the Maths Be with you!
The basic problem isn't the algorithm they choose. It's that their goal is incompatible with security.
They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.
How can this be done "securely"? It cannot.
Let's assume you get these politicians to understand some basics of encryption and physical security (and good luck with that). So, you now have a system where all people can be instantly identified and tracked by the government. Secure from... what, exactly? Secure from being tracked by unauthorized people?
Who is unauthorized, and why? I certainly have no say in who gets authorized to track me. Thousands or hundreds of thousands of random workers have access to the "authorized" level. This doesn't sound very "secure" to me.
It's like an electrocution collar you get to wear around town, "secure" in the knowledge that its encryption protocol is flawless. The only people who can activate it are from the police department, or friends of police officers, or people who sneak into the police building and use a computer there when nobody's looking. It is secure, and cannot be triggered except from the police station. Yet, in the broader sense of security, the mere fact of the collar's existence around my neck is the absolute opposite of security.
It doesn't really matter how secure they make the algorithms. A system whose purpose is to authoritatively track and identify all individual humans "from above" is insecure, by definition.
But just look at history. A better choice always takes more time to create, and is more expensive to design and implement, but in the long run it pays off much better. Take Unix, most of RSA's products, etc. There's no short cut to success, there is no overnight solution. Its just that a lot of people with power can't simply realize that common fact.
Well, to whoever said common sense was common
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
OK, fair enough, I stopped at the paragraph before that as it happens. So put in measures so the passport can't be read through the envelope, e.g. sealed foil jacket. Of course the postman could just open the letter anyway but hey he already could to read the details from the passport.
Back-off is reasonable except then someone just wanders through Heathrow spamming passports with their 10m-range RFID reader and then nobody flies.
How is this cracked?
The passport functioned as designed. The only thing the key is designed to prevent is remote surreptitious downloading of the data from the chip. If you hand someone the passport, what sort of privacy do you expect?
Call me when they can successfully ALTER the chip data and create a valid digital signature. Merely copying the data won't help.
This reporter is clueless. I stoped reading when he/she said that 3DES is "military encryption times 3". DES was a civ cyper by desgin and was "broken" a long time ago due to weak keys and such a small key space. 3DES was quick fix and is still used and is still OK in some situations. But it is not military standard (I think AES is however).
As others above have stated, this is not "cracked" either and they are unable to change the data on the chip. Futhermore they need to read the inside page of the passport to "sniff" for the chip data. I would be happier however, with a contact card rather than contanctless....
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The question isn't whether it's crackable. You're never going to be able to make a 100% secure passport or any other type of identification for that matter. If you get a smart enough group of people together with the proper resources they will be able to crack it. The question is whether or not the technology in question is a cost effective improvement over it's predecessor.
If there was no encryption of the information on the RFID chip, anyone within a certain RFID range would be able to steal it.
By putting the "key", albeit plainly visible as name, date-of-birth and passport-number information, inside the passport, you at least limit access to people who can read the RFID chip *and* physically access the passport.
It has not been cracked !
....
As usual the journalist is confusing everything. What these bozos have done is just read the content of the RFID chip exactly in the same way a custom officer would have done: using the key which is *printed* on the passport !
Basically this chip do what it has been designed for: improve the difficulty to create fake passports.
Now of course you have always some neo-luddites like those who are spreading FUD in order to sway opinions who will never read the details of the article and just remember the passports have been "cracked"
Pityfull
http://www.transparency.org
That's a big part of the problem. Whose retarded idea was it to use RFID? Wouldn't, say, a smart card chip like the chip & pin card in credit cards have been MUCH better because then you actually need to physically have the passport in your hand to read it - instead of being able to read it through envelopes, clothing and the like with no evidence that it's been read?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Even better: read a passport's chip, follow the man until he reaches his car. Make a small accident (your guilt), and let repairs be solved the official way - you will know his name (full name), address, and maybe other info from the exchange of insurance info