E-Passport Program Proven Unsecure and Therefore Vulnerable
Since 2007, the U.S. government has been issuing high tech, biometric “e-passports,” hoping it will make getting a fake passport extremely hard. Unfortunately for the government, it is very easy for anyone with basic forgery skills to get these e-passports.
To find out just how easy it really is, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigator used multiple fake IDs to get real e-passports without problem. He used one of the passports to buy plane tickets, where he actually got a boarding pass, he made it through security and could have gotten on the plane if he wanted to. The shocking part is that the younger investigator used the social security number of a man who died in 1965, a fictitious 5-year-old child created for a previous investigation, and an ID that said he was 53-years-old.
After presenting this case to the government, they agreed that there was a “major vulnerability” in the passport issuance process and agreed to investigate it further.
(Via Schneier)
