The new RFID Passports designed and created to be hack proof can be hacked in less than an hour using a cloning tool. British researchers embedded pictures of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber onto a set of chips and then tested them. They came up as “real” according to the agency that sets e-passport standards which is very worrying.
Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.
A baby boy’s passport chip was altered to contain an image of Osama bin Laden, and the passport of a 36-year-old woman was changed to feature a picture of Hiba Darghmeh, a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed three people in 2003. The unlikely identities were chosen so that there could be no suggestion that either Mr van Beek or The Times was faking viable travel documents.
The passports do not match the printed ID numbers embedded into every document, which should raise some suspicions but that would seem to be easier to fake than the already hacked chip.
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RFID Hackproof passports - HACKED within an hour
