Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
Monday August 7, 2006
The Guardian

Hi-tech biometric passports used by Britain and other countries have been hacked by a computer expert, throwing into doubt fundamental parts of the UK's £415m scheme to load passports with information such as fingerprints, facial scans and iris patterns.
Speaking at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Lukas Grunwald, a consultant with a German security company, said he had discovered a method for cloning the information stored in the new passports. Data can be transferred onto blank chips, which could then be implanted in fake passports, a flaw which he said undermined the project.

The revelation also casts another shadow over the government's plan for a national ID card, which would contain much of the same information.
"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Mr Grunwald told Wired.com. "From my point of view all of these [biometric] passports are a huge waste of money - they're not increasing security at all." Since March anyone applying for a UK passport has been issued with a biometric version, which contains physical identification information.

Another speaker at the same conference is a British hacker named Adam Laurie (aka Major Malfunction). He's an expert on hacking magstripe readers and Bluetooth, among other things.

The Guardian in May had a great article by a reporter who was given an idea by Adam. Adam said he believed that if you are a "Gold" passenger with British Airways, then someone could steal your identity using only the ticket stub that people throw out after their flight.

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Originally posted by blake 3:17:
Full story.

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I'm pretty sure it will fail. It said the test in 2003 worked 75 to 90 percent of the time. Even if they could push that to 99 percent success rate, it would not leave the system workable. Mostly because it's really hard to deal with 1 percent of people being falsely identified as someone else. It becomes really hard to prove that you have been misidentified, and 1 percent mean a huge number of people are getting screwed.