Storm building over RFID-enabled passports

Earlier this year, Dutch security firm Riscure conducted a test where it was able to intercept a data exchange between an e-passport and RFID reader and crack the encrypted files to expose fingerprints, photographs and other data.

The Dutch passports employ the same ISO 14443 chips and the BAC encryption scheme standards used by the United States and other countries issuing e-passports. Those global standards were set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a group within the United Nations.

In addition, at the Black Hat hacker conference this summer, a German researcher was able to clone an e-passport chip, although he admitted it is impossible to change the data on the chip.

"I travel abroad frequently and I would hate to be among the guinea-pigs who become subject to identity theft while this new technology is essentially beta-tested in the real-world," says Andre Duran, CEO of Ping Identity, which develops identity federation technology. "While an optimist, I've learned the hard way it's safer to assume a hostile environment. Securing this chip from those with malicious intent appears to have been an afterthought."

Others agree there are enough lingering questions to move cautiously.

"It is clear that there are ways to read the information from these e-passports, but whether that constitutes a security exposure that the average person should be worried about is not clear," says Bob Blakley, principal analyst with the Burton Group. "But 'not clear' is not necessarily a good case for something that is going to be issued to millions of people. Conservatism is probably a good stance when working at that scale." Currently there are 70 million passport issued to U.S. citizens.

Blakley, who formerly was chief scientist for security and privacy at IBM, says one security questions that needs to be asked is if the e-passport solves any real problems at the U.S. border.

"We are gong to spend a very large amount of money to produce a more complicated [identity] artifact and it is not easy to quantify what we are buying for all that money and effort," says Blakley.

Proponents say what is clear is that the smart card technology used in the e-passport has a track record from its use in millions of mobile phones and payment cards.

"It's true this is new technology for passports, but the technology has been around for 25 years and it was designed to be a secure form of data protection," says Randy

Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. "Speculation from the Bruce Schneier's and others is that nobody knows what can happen in the future in terms of people's ability to come up with new and innovative ways to break into systems so therefore we should not trust any system out there. Our view is you can't go around predicting something might happen in the future and therefore stop all innovation and change."

The State Department's Moss says the e-passport is but one line of defense.

"This is not a magic bullet, it's just another major [security] tool."