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?'"
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'!!
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!
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.
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