By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News
A German hacker and security consultant, Lukas Grunwald, has again demonstrated how Governments are enforcing insecure technology that puts our security, identity and privacy at risk, while claiming to provide the exact opposite.
Biometric passports containing the highly controversial RFID chips have been shown to be even more vulnerable than first thought as Grunwald managed to crash two passport readers and states it could be possible to reprogram readers to approve forged or expired passports. The exploit will also allow someone to access, hijack and clone a passport holder’s fingerprint, a truly shocking revelation.
It is also possible to create false fingerprints to fool the system but officials bury their head in the sand and remain silent on the issue.
RFID enabled biometric passports were specifically introduced, or so we are told, to prevent passport forgery and increase national security but as Grunwald has discovered, they actually reduce security and provide hackers and identity thieves with a new set of tools to compromise our welfar and allow hackers to override the computer system.
Grunwald stated: “The whole passport design is totally brain damaged, from my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They’re not increasing security at all.”
Last year he demonstrated how easy it is to clone passports.
“If you’re able to crash something you are most likely able to exploit it, I predict that most of the vendors are using off-the-shelf (software) libraries for decoding the JPEG2000 images,” says Grunwald, meaning all airports are susceptible to the hack.
The U.S. State Department had no comment, a telling sign.