I have just received my new passport. I am not British, and I will be deliberately vague about the country that issued it. The fee for getting it renewed was significantly higher than last time. I do like the nice touch of requiring me to pay a “priority fee” for getting the new passport in a reasonable time. The idea that we should help our citizens by being prompt and efficient in the first place is gone completely.
Upon receiving the passport, I perhaps discovered the reason for the higher fee. The passport has a little logo of a chip on the front cover and on the details page. There is an insert stating that “This is an ePassport. This passport contains a microchip which stores the same information that as appears on the data age. The chip can be read electronically to confirm the identity of the bearer. This document complies with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and incorporates security features to prevent illegal access to the information stored on the chip. See the centre page of the passport for further information”.
My country is the sort of place that tends to be proud of being first on the block with respect to implementing fancy new international protocols, so I suppose this does not greatly surprise me. If the chip only contains the same data as the details page, then I rather fail to see the point, given that the passport is machine readable already. If the intention is to add more data to such chips later, I am not sure that the present “This is just a new way of storing the same data” claims are entirely honest. Storing digitally signed data on the chip probably does make sense and genuinely does make such a passport harder to forge. So I will concede that point.
Still, making it possible to read the passport without requiring it to be opened seems to me to rather reduce my security rather than increase it. As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it. Even if I made the ludicrous assumption that I trust every government in the world, I still find it hard to believe that such a widely distributed technology would not fall into private hands.
So, where from here. Well, as it happens I can turn to the centre page of the passport. This page is stiffer than the others, presumably due to having a chip embedded in it. It also has information written on it. “This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, please do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures or excess moisture”.
So, which of those things should I try first?
An electromagnet won’t help. What you need is to give your e-Passport a *short* nuking in a microwave oven.
I’d suggest a couple of seconds, take it out and see if the chip is noticeably hot to the touch. If not, another couple of seconds. Get the idea?
[You might also choose to use someone else’s microwave, as running a mwave ‘unloaded’ can cause flashover in the magnetron]
Alternately, the next time you feel the urge to nuke last night’s pizza for breakfast, give yourself a side order of passport. Then at least it won’t be unloaded.
Tanuki beat me to it.
Apparently the cover of the passport incorporates some shielding, I would suggest opening it before sticking it in the microwave.
How cold can you get your freezer? I’d turn it down as low as it goes and freeze your passport over night. In the morning preheat your oven to about 760 Rankin. Once the oven is up to temperature put your passport directly in there from the freezer. Leave it there for 20min or so, the temperature change should do lovely things to the electronics.
Sorry dude- Privacy is dead. The only thing standing between us and Big Brother is government incompetence.
Fortunately there is a lot of that.
As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it.
Not at all. The US government (and for this, we can read “all the first world ones”) doesn’t care if someone at a border crossing between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan can read your passport’s RFID chip. Hell, I suspect they don’t care very much if the Eurozone countries can read it.
They care that US border entry points can read it, and that the signed RFID really does make the marginal cost of forgeries much, much higher.
The RFID chip also contains biometric information – at least height and eye color, I reckon, and possibly even a digitized version of the picture to make simple picture changing on the passport produce an instant fail, as it were.
The last one alone, from an anti-forgery perspective, is compelling.
Wired had an article on this for US passport last year.
First thing, no go on the microwave. It can spark and scorch the passport, and outside damage is kind of a give away.
Instead they recommended wailing on it with a mallet.
Or if you just concerned about random ne’er do wells reading it, wrap it aluminum foil. But I imagine you just want to spit in the eye of whatever statist came up with the idea. Still might be fun to do the aluminum thing afterwards and act overly concerned about protecting what is in fact a broken chip.
if you do use the microwave, put a bowl of water in with it to avoid the aforementioned flashover. Or a hot pocket, burrito, aforementioned pizza, whatever microwavable gut buster appeals to you.
OK, I know that a lot of you guys are engineers and physicists, etc., and I appreciate the technical expertise you bring to this site, but vivictius, why the hell would you specify setting the oven at “760 Rankin”? I’m used to Fahrenheit, I understand Celcius, I could even deal with Kelvin, but who has ever even heard of “Rankin”? I had to look it up, and frankly I see no purpose to it. Is your oven calibrated in Rankins? If so, how did you get the aliens to deliver it? (In my experience, they’re always taking, not giving.)
I’ve experimented with RFID chips in microwave ovens (although just on their own – not in the context of an RFIDed passport, since my UK passport doesn’t need to be renewed until 2015). The best thing to do is to do it very slowly – put it on a low setting and just do little blasts. With the RFID chip I destroyed, it took about 15 seconds on ‘medium’ setting (in a 950w microwave). It started sparking and left a very small brown mark on the paper casing.
Gizmodo suggests using a hammer. This has a certain plausible deniability about it – you could have quite easily fallen over while you had your passport in your back pocket and landed on it, or dropped your suitcase on top of it by mistake while at the airport.
You might also want to look into this article (and a blog post) about a talk at the German hacker conference, CCC – where they demoed a permanent RFID deactivator made from a single-use camera which uses high-powered electromagnetic fields to basically fry the chip.
Of course, this is just a theoretical discussion. I’m not condoning that you break federal law. Not at all.
Would you rather we set the oven to 200 degrees Réaumur? 😉
I used to go
Uptown Top Rankin
in my youth
Yes it used to get very hot!
Not that we were calibrating anything much more than the sweat running down an inviting mini skirted thigh…
Sigh! Those were the days, smoking in airplanes. You dont know your born etc.
Other than that
just jump up and down on them a few times
this govt is bound to buy cheap!
Always works for me.
Thanks, Ted; that’s much better. Although that’s quite a bit hotter than 760 Rankin, isn’t it?
RAB, what are you smoking?
Sorry dude- Privacy is dead.
Indeed, I think it is. It just seems to me that we have given it up voluntarily ang received nothing whatsoever in return. The deal that we have accepted (largely without complaint) seems an astonishingly bad one.
Only the very best Laird 🙂
Well, since I know alot of folks here are off in metric land they are more use to celsius but those of us in the State (and Belize) are more familiar with Fahrenheit. Since I really cant please everyone (well, I could have put both, but thats really too much work) I might as well not please anyone. (-:
Good work, vivictius; I think you succeeded! 🙂
Concur on the mircrowave. A second or two at a time, for a few tries. Shouldn’t get hot enough to leave a mark.
Microwave will do it. BUT… if you’re a Brit and you want to actual travel abroad and come back into the country via an Airport they will have issues with why your passport is not read by the RFID scanner they now use. So, it could lead to significant delays at immigration while they validate that it is a real passport.
It’s actually a royal PITA because the time to machine read the RFID chip is significantly longer than it was to scan the old bar code, or even better, the old days where they just glanced at the picture and handed it back.
Likewise, it might also soon present problems entering the USA if the chip is damaged if you want to use the Visa waiver programme.
So, while it is annoying to have the chip in there, I’d suggest thinking twice before breaking it if you actually expect to use the Passport for travel.
Indeed, I think it is. It just seems to me that we have given it up voluntarily ang received nothing whatsoever in return. The deal that we have accepted (largely without complaint) seems an astonishingly bad one.
Well, that depends. The degree of easy freedom of movement, at least if you’ve a British or Irish passport is pretty astonishing even compared to a few decades ago.
With only a few exceptions I can pretty much book a business trip and go. Something that’s not open to other passport holders and while the RFID thing is new to that. I think the freedom of motion I get is pretty cool, particularly that for the moment travel isn’t an automatic right. Which is a shame.
China and Russia are the only real exceptions for places I go to a lot. Russia is the nightmare as you need a current HIV test for a multiple entry business visa. Frankly I am getting quite tired of that myself as it seems to be a requirement for far too many things – a US residence permit, US life insurance… bleh.
Daveon: Yep, you have just nailed the reason why I have never been to Russia. If they want to make it that big a hassle for me to come, then I generally choose to go somewhere else. (I will no doubt get over this and go there at some point regardless. At the margins it makes a difference though. Given a choice of a country where there are hassles and one here there aren’t, I choose the no hassles one every time). China is a little bit of a nuisance but not much worse than that.
If you want the passport to still be usuable (i.e. you want to travel without the risk of not being let back in because your passport’s chip is unreadable), I recommend a tinfoil wallet. Whenever you’re not showing the passport to someone, keep it in a pouch lined with aluminum foil. It’ll act a a farady cage, making the RFID chip unreadable until you take it out.
Electronic monitoring.
Well, there’s always the approach that you load as much useless and similar GIGO info into all you friends readers, monitors, and data banks, that the human interface point (the clerk looking at the monitor) can’t possibly process the flood.
Human sloth and fatigue can be counted on religiously, especially in the ilk of folk that are suited for mind numbing bureaucratic clerk jobs.
As with ANY casual pissing on the third rail, there are
ALWAYS the risks of unintended consequence.
Personally, I like the battery powered, hand held, EMP generator approach. I suspect rechargeable photo flash
units from pawn and junk….(eh hem) antique shops
have more technical promise while the disposable camera flash circuit , while less powerful, has superior “plain sight” concealability promise.
I imagine if the RFID chips embedded in the rubber of Pacific rim (et al) tires, and other stuff sold by the likes of Mall Wart, were fried to a crisp, the product would be destroyed. Universal RFID readers would be helpful in detecting ANY sort of signal if exploring the “gradually stronger ” approach cited above.
I look forward to cook books with recipes for effectively roasting specific products with the minimal risk of damage to the host.
Kind of like modern pharma.
Apparently the cover of the passport incorporates some shielding
No it doesn’t. The US one does.
NO2ID has demonstrated (for the Mail – you surely didn’t think they had the idea themselves?) that you can take all the information off a GB passport without opening the envelope it is dispatched in. Unfortunately the press didn’t quite get the implications – and TV didn’t understand at all – so there wasn’t quite the fuss we’d hoped for.
The new ICAO passports are “secure” from the point of view of the state. They do less than nothing for the security of the citizen.
A US company called Emvelope markets a secure passport cover for $20:
http://www.emvelope.com/products/show/7
Using this privacy technology allows you and the bureaucrats to coexist peacefully.
Guy,
I thank you again. A year and a half ago at your encouragement I renewed my passport . My new one expires in 2016. My old one had expired so I needed to renew anyway but it was your information that lit a fire under me to get it done.