Not as hard as they say- Hackers Clone E-Passports

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

Hackers Clone E-Passports

By Kim Zetter
02:00 AM Aug, 03, 2006

LAS VEGAS -- A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.

The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery. But Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy.

"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Grunwald says. "From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."

Grunwald plans to demonstrate the cloning technique Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

More at: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71521-0.html?tw=wn_index_16

[The Straight Story]

1. This is the kind of crap we put up with at work and in govt

The people making the decisions on tech stuff are not real technical.

I am a manger myself, but have over a decade of solid tech expertise in several fields (data bases programming, etc). I see people put into positions of managing tech projects who have no idea how the technology works. One example would be data bases - they push out a flat table with no normalization, and wonder why it doesn't scale and fills up fast, why it is slow and reporting sucks, etc and so on.

Drives me nuts on conference calls :)