http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2108437,00.asp 

By Lisa Vaas
March 27, 2007

As if RFID chips in driver's licenses and passports weren't scary enough 
already, London's Royal Academy of Engineering is suggesting that 
someday a terrorist will be able to read personal details from a 
distance and, given the right antennas and amplification, set a bomb to 
go off when a particular person gets within range.

It's already widely acknowledged that unencrypted data stored on an RFID 
chip in a passport can be read covertly by anybody with a pass-by 
reader.

As the ACLU pointed out at Black Hat earlier in March, you can buy parts 
on the Internet to make a reader for as little as $20.

With a reader, you can pick up whatever the RFID chip is sending out: 
passport number; name; where an individual was at, at what time; name; 
address; Social Security number, etc.

The ability of RFID to be subverted in far more dangerous ways was only 
one example of how advancing technology can be exploited in the future, 
according to the Royal Academy.

The Academy on March 26 released a report titled "Dilemmas of Privacy 
and Surveillance: Challenges of Technological Change," by Nigel Gilbert, 
chairman of the Academy's group on Privacy and Surveillance.

Here are some other technology shocks that have already occurred or that 
may come to pass, according to Gilbert:

* Unencrypted data can be forged. The United Kingdom, for one, 
  introduced biometric passports in March 2006.

The e-Passport, as it's called, uses facial recognition to link an 
individual with a paper passport, with iris and fingerprint data used as 
backup, and other countries have expressed interest in using biometrics 
as well.

Because the data will be read at places such as passport control to 
verify the identity of the holder, the data have to be quickly and 
reliably transmittedhence, use of RFID chips have been proposed.

A forged passport could include a passport carrier's biometric 
information but with forged personal details, including name, date of 
birth and citizenship.

Of course, passports could be checked against a central database to 
ensure that the data on a given passport matches the master set. But 
then, it's unnecessary to store the data on a passport, since it can be 
retrieved from the central database.

"Encrypting the data on the e-Passports can help to avoid these 
problems," Gilbert writes, "but even then there is potential for 
failure. Firstly, if the encryption codes can be broken, then the two 
vulnerabilities reappear. Secondly, a problem with current plans for 
e-Passports in the U.K. is that the key for the data on the chip is 
stored on the passport itselfso the encryption does not in fact lock out 
eavesdroppers."

The only way to keep RFID passport information truly safe, Gilbert says, 
is to encrypt with extremely tough algorithms and to disable the access 
to encrypted data on the passport by using a key stored on the passport 
itself.

"Otherwise, efforts should be focused on an altogether different way of 
designing e-Passports," he said.

* Plans for more dangerous data leaks than ever are in the works.

It's a pedophile's dream come true: children's data stored in a national 
database.

The U.K. is reportedly planning to take fingerprints as well as names 
and addresses from children as young as 11 and store it all in a 
government database.

The children's data, as a subset of the U.K.'s biometric passport 
scheme, will be transferred to the country's new national identity 
database when the children turn 16.

The consequences of data breaches or leaks on such a database could be 
"extremely serious," Gilbert says. "This information could be used by 
pedophiles to target those children for abuse," he writes.

Other serious data leaks that have happened or could still happen, 
Gilbert points out: leaks of credit-card data used to embarrass public 
figures; leaks of the addresses of staff who work at sensitive sites, 
such as abortion clinics or research centers that practice animal 
experimentation; leaks of health records that could doom the employment 
prospects of patients or even expose them to risk of violence, including 
HIV status or a record showing that a woman had had a pregnancy 
terminated (if this was unknown to her partner or parent), or data (such 
as DNA or blood group) showing that the paternity of a child could not 
be the presumed father.

The report details other worst-case scenarios, including identity fraud 
assisted by the Semantic Web and its extensive publicly accessible 
personal details of individuals as well as the use of fingerprint images 
to fool a pay-by-touch system.

The future of technology misuse may look dire, but Gilbert offers ways 
to secure even the scariest technology.

For example, A biometric pay-by-touch system that requires two forms of 
identificationa PIN and a fingerprintwould be "much more successful" in 
preventing fraud than one that relies only on a fingerprint, he said.

Regarding RFID-enabled passports and the possibility that they could be 
linked to bombs or other, less dramatic abuses, one workaround is to 
forgo RFID chips for a technology such as that now being developed by 
Ingenia Technology called "Laser Surface Authentication."

LSA technology takes into account the unique surface qualities of a 
given document. Paper documents and credit card plastics have unique 
microscopic surface qualities attributable to how paper fibers are 
arranged or how the plastic has been set.

"These qualities cannot be controlled and cannot be copied, and they are 
unique in every caserather like human fingerprints," Gilbert writes.

"Ingenia have devised a way of scanning documents to reveal these 
surface properties, which they refer to as the 'LSA fingerprint.' The 
system they have created is 'read-only', the document is passive, it is 
simply scanned and a record of its surface features is recorded."


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