cloning e-passports

Apparently it takes fives minutes for someone to acquire your identity! the BBC article ePassports ‘at risk’ from cloning by David Reid is quite alarming…

So how did they do it?

The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets.

The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.

But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.

Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo.

Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport’s data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.

Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.