Airline Tests RFID on the Fly By Ryan Singel Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68451,00.html
02:00 AM Aug. 09, 2005 PT United Airlines pilots and crew are the flying guinea pigs in a test of controversial new passports equipped with remotely readable chips. Approximately 300 United employees stationed on international flights received the new passports in mid-June as part of a three-month, three-country test of IDs equipped with RFID chips. The chips can be read at a distance at border crossings by special readers installed for the trial. The test is intended to see how easily Australia, New Zealand and the United States can read other's e-passports and how durable the chips are under constant use. The new chips are part of post-9/11 security efforts intended to curb passport fraud and speed up border crossings, according to Frank Moss, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for passport services. "The new passport undercuts the market in lost and stolen travel documents, because if you steal one of these you are not going to do much with it," Moss said. The 64-KB chips store a copy of the information from a passport's data page, including name, date of birth and a digitized version of the passport photo. To prevent counterfeiting or alterations, the chips are digitally signed. The United States is requiring all 27 countries whose citizens do not need visas to visit to begin issuing e-passports by October 2006. The original deadline was October 2004, but wrangling over standards and privacy protections has delayed upgrades by many of those countries. Stateside critics would like to derail the current U.S. effort -- they believe the unencrypted chips could endanger Americans. Because the chips can be read from several feet away, they could serve as a beacon to thieves and terrorists targeting Americans traveling abroad, critics say. They argue the chips should either be locked down with encryption or replaced with optical technology that can only be read if the passport is flipped open. When the State Department opened the plan for public comment, over 2,000 individuals, along with privacy and business-travel advocacy groups, criticized the technology. In response to that criticism, and demonstrations of the chips' range, the State Department included some shielding in the covers of the passports given to the United employees. The agency didn't disclose what kind of material it used, but it has in the past publicly considered employing a metallic fiber weave in the cover. The United States is also contemplating more safeguards, including the encryption technology it initially opposed, as it moves toward issuing the passports to the general public in early 2006. "We are seriously considering the adoption of basic access control," Moss said, referring to a process where chips remain locked until a code on the data page is first read by an optical scanner. The chip would then also transmit only encrypted data in order to prevent eavesdropping. Roy Want, an RFID expert at Intel, doesn¹t dismiss the possibility that e-passports could put travelers at risk of being robbed or killed. But he says covertly reading the devices is not easy in the real world. "If have your passport in your bag which has metal keys or candy wrappers, it is going to disrupt the transfer of information," Want said. "If you have a very sophisticated piece of technology, you may be able to read them, but someone is not going to walk around with some sort of clever PDA that is going to measure these." Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is unwilling to accept such assurances until he sees the government's test data, which has not yet been made public. He also questions whether the government is actually considering using encryption. "I am skeptical how serious they are about basic access control if they are testing this in the wild and they are using chips that broadcast in the clear," Tien said. Officials from the three countries will meet this week to discuss the interoperability results, while results from laboratory tests will be shared publicly in September, according to the State Department. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
