Kiwi expert cracks chip passport

[Peter Gutmann]

"David G. Koontz" <david_koontz at xtra.co.nz> writes:

>http://www.stuff.co.nz/4659100a28.html?source=RSStech_20080817
>
>Peter Gutmann has gotten himself in the news along with Adam Laurie and
>Jeroen van Beek for altering the passport microchip in a passport.

The original story was actually the coverage in the UK Times last week,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4467098.ece.  It was a
three-person effort, Adam Laurie did the RFID part (via RFIDIOt), Jeroen van
Beek did the passport software implementation and tying the whole thing
together, all I did was the signing.  We never touched the passport chip, what
we showed was that it's possible to create your own fictitious e-passport
that's accepted as valid by the reference Golden Reader Tool.  In other words
we showed that what security researchers had been warning about ever since e-
passports were first proposed was actually possible, following the l0pht's
motto "Making the theoretical practical".  Jeroen presented the work at Black
Hat'08,
http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-08/bh-usa-08-speakers.html#vanBeek.

>http://www.stuff.co.nz/images/748842.jpg

Ugh, no, make it go away.

(Alert readers may notice the anomaly with the carefully-placed monitor right
behind my head, which is displaying something slightly different from the
surrounding sea of Vista desktops :-).  It's actually a file photo from a news
story from the start of last year about Vista).

Peter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com