PASSPORTS, LIKE ANY physical ID, can be altered and forged. That's partly why for the last 11 years the United States has put RFID chips in the back panel of its passports, creating so-called e-Passports. The chip stores your passport information—like name, date of birth, passport number, your photo, and even a biometric identifier—for quick, machine-readable border checks. And while e-Passports also store a cryptographic signature to prevent tampering or forgeries, it turns out that despite having over a decade to do so, US Customs and Border Protection hasn't deployed the software needed to actually verify it.
This means that since as far back as 2006, a skilled hacker could alter the data on an e-Passport chip—like the name, photo, or expiration date—without fear that signature verification would alert a border agent to the changes.
The situation appears particularly shameful given that the US led the promotion of e-Passports around the world. "I had assumed that they would verify this," says Martijn Grooten, a security researcher for the information and testing platform Virus Bulletin.
The Final Frontier
There can be no thought of finishing for ‘aiming for the stars.’ Both figuratively and literally, it is a task to occupy the generations. And no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.
There can be no thought of finishing for ‘aiming for the stars.’ Both figuratively and literally, it is a task to occupy the generations. And no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.
Reaching for the Stars
As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.
To go places and do things that have never been done before – that’s what living is all about.
The holdup doesn't surprise longtime border security observers. "If you look at DHS’s track record on taking proposals from the RDT&E stage through validation and deployment, it’s a horrible track record," says Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the earth.
Researchers like Virus Bulletin's Grooten note that even without signature validation ensuring data integrity, it would still take technical skill to manipulate the information on an e-Passport's RFID chip.