Ever since I first travelled abroad on an airplane as a young boy, I found it interesting to observe the screening and security procedures at airports, train stations and borders. Customs/Immigration officers typically peruse a travel document, be it a passport or visa for less than 20 seconds before handing it back to its owner.
Perhaps this was because I was the owner of a Hellenic passport. It was the reason I’ve often been singled out among my fellow travelers and friends for ‘additional checks’. I recall several cases — even back when I did not wear a beard, arguably a controversial characteristic even for a very fair-skinned, brown-haired south European such as myself — when my Hellenic passport was the reason my friends stood there waiting for me while an immigration officer tapped away my passport number at his computer terminal, or the Swiss Douane officers took their time checking my passport, leaving us waiting in the car with my friends perplexed and wondering what the problem was (I was typically the only Hellene in the group). I was always curious as to why in the EU15, Hellas was the only EU state not participating in the U.S. Visa Waiver programme, despite having their passports follow the EU template as did everyone else.
And the reasons of course were that, first, the European and US Governments knew really well how clumsy and superficial Hellenic government security procedures were and, second, counterfeit Hellenic passports were a common way unwanted/illegal travellers entered Europe — with Hellas being geographically linked/close to Asia Minor, Africa etc.
And then came 2004, and the Hellenic government, along with many other Western governments, passed a law that required the issuing of new, security hardened biometric machine readable passports. In Hellas the new e-Passports are issued by police departments and since August of 2006 they contain a High-Frequency (HF) RFID chip that includes encrypted biometric information.
Immediately after this, far too many people started expressing their disapproval and concerns about the inclusion of biometric data in digital form on the passport and the use of RFID technology. Those people were not just the usual paranoid privacy advocates, but also engineers, scientists, even members of government or EU-wide committees and world-renowned security experts . And why is that, you may ask?
Well the reasons are multiple, but suffice it to say that it seems that the primary reason for which RFID chips were included in the passports — i.e. added security — is actually decreasing security: some people expressed the opinion that copying the data off the passport is relatively easy to do. What this means, is that someone could, theoretically, easily copy your encrypted biometric data off your RFID chip and write that data on another chip that they could — presumably — embed in a fake passport. And then, in 2006, several researchers announced that they had cloned the data of German and later British biometric passports using cheap desktop RFID readers. The same thing happened with passports of other countries, such the U.S. and the Netherlands. Their achievement meant that the chips were cloneable. Now, new passports contain several other features that make them hard to physically copy, but that’s exactly what we’ve been hearing about the Euro banknotes and still there were several cases in the past few years when counterfeit Euro banknotes and, in some cases, the labs creating them were discovered by police all over Europe. In addition, increased dependence on the ‘high security’ of the RFID chip, and the fact that no immigration officer spends too much time on a single passport anyway, how can we be so sure that the new e-Passports will not be hacked en masse in the coming years?
So how useful are e-Passports, really? To citizens or to governments. Are they a pointless exercise in costly government spending and corporation profiteering? A mishap of government security policy? Well, not exactly. I believe that it depends on the implementation. Trustworthy, tamperproof passport chips (not RFID) storing biometric information could, theoretically, provide faster, easier processing of traveller information and provide higher security. The advantages would, arguably, lie mostly on the side of the authorities and not that of the individual, but — still — there would be few reasons against having them.
A bad implementation of RFID technology, as what the current e-Passports seem to represent, is extremely dangerous and actually decreases the security of the passports in addition to compromising the privacy of their owners: according to the findings EU funded IST FP6 project called Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS), information stored on the European e-Passports can allegedly be be retrieved by someone standing relatively close to you (eavesdropping is allegedly possible on a ~10 metre radius) using a reader in his pocket or briefcase. This, completely negates the raison d’être of RFID chips as a security feature, as cloning of the chip is then possible. Furthermore, weak encryption (or a stupid/obvious choice of key, as seems to be the case in some EU passports today) would even allow access to the actual data contained therein, compromising your identity and personal information.
So it seems that the implementation of the European e-Passports (and there are few reasons to believe that the new U.S. passports are any better — they all follow the same ICAO standard) allows for easy access to the encrypted data and easy decryption of the data using a key made up of human-readable information written on the passport itself, according to FIDIS. The same report, presents a scary, yet intriguing scenario whereby RFID-triggered person-specific explosive devices would be used to attack a specific person or type of person.
Nightmarish? You bet. It is evident that the e-Passports scheme was designed and implemented in a hurry, arguably under intense pressure by the US Government following the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks. As Christian Böttger, a security consultant for the german consultancy DN Systems stated on the BBC:
There are lots of technical flaws in it and there are things that have just been forgotten, so it is basically not doing what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to get a higher security level. It is not.
What can you do about it as an individual? Well, for starters you can write to your MP/MEP about this. This is important as the sooner the Commission and European governments get their act together with respect to the robustness and security of their biometric passport implementations the better it is for us. US e-passports are shielded on one side, so whenever the passport is partway open eavesdropping can occur. I have no idea whether European passports have any shielding; I do not think they do. So, just to be safe, you can also get yourself a shield for your passport: an aluminum foil pocket will probably do the trick, but if you’re interested in spending some hard-earned cash for this you could get some commercial products [EMVelope, DIFRWear] or just the EM Field shielding fabric to make your own wallet/pocket.
Sadly, since the 1st of January 2007, passport renewal and acquisition of new RFID e-passports has become obligatory for citizens of Hellas, it is probably too late to fix the technical issues, at least for this country. Ironically, despite all the added ‘security features’ of the new passports, Hellas is still not going to be qualified for the U.S. Visa Waiver programme, despite meeting all the requirements. It seems the only thing ‘waived’ between the old and new passports is our privacy.