RFID Passports... Close, But Not Quite

from the one-more-step-please dept

Last week, we wrote about the new plans by the State Department to put RFID chips in passports, noting that the precautions they took this time around looked much better, and hoped that they would do an adequate job protecting peoples' information. Bruce Schneier has chimed in to say that, indeed, the two big steps they took (shielding and access control) are absolutely steps in the right direction that others should follow, but there's still one more problem they need to fix. The chips broadcast unique IDs to help readers isolate the signal of a single chip, and it's not clear how these unique IDs are implemented. Schneier is afraid that the implementation can lead to vulnerabilities. But, more importantly, seeing that this point was missed, it points out how hard it really is to make things like this truly secure. There's always "something else" that opens you up to security holes, especially when the details of how something is implemented aren't made clear. The worst case scenario is finding out about yet another security vulnerability, well after these passports are out there.

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