Philippe Naughton writes in The Times:

News that a German computer expert has managed to “clone” the data chip on his new passport has called into question government assurances about the security of the planned national ID card – which will use similar technology.

Lukas Grunwald gave a demonstration at a conference in Las Vegas last week to show that he could copy the information stored on the new passports, that have been issued in Britain since March.

Although Herr Grunwald was not able to modify any of the data on his own passport, he was able to insert the copied information on another chip that could be put into a forged passport or used to fool a card-reading machine.

Herr Grunwald told the Wired.com news website that it had taken him just two weeks to work out how to clone the radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips contained in his own German passport.

“The whole passport design is totally brain-damaged,” he said. “From my point of view, all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They’re not increasing security at all.”

The German’s cloning exploit provides another argument for campaigners against the British ID cards, who argue that they will violate people’s privacy, will be too expensive and are unnecessary.

They also back up the view of Dame Stella Rimington, the former MI5 director, who said last year that if the cards could be forged they would be “absolutely useless”.

Phil Booth, national coordinator of the No2ID campaign, said that although Herr Grunwald had only been copying the data on his passport, still encrypted, a hacker in the Netherlands had managed to get readable data from another passport after “a couple of hours on a normal PC”.

“As we understand it, the ID card will be a passport lite, for travel inside Europe, which means that they will have to use the same technology as in the passport on the cards, which begs the question – if they are already compromised why are we going down this line?” Mr Booth said.

This entry was posted by andrew on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 23:45 and is filed under Anti, General, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.