ID cards 'to be UK institution'
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The ID card scheme will be a "great British institution" like the railways in the 19th Century, a minister predicts.
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Prime Minister Tony Blair announced plans Monday to introduce high-tech biometric identity cards, saying they could be a significant means of fighting terrorism.
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City officials approved a plan Monday to offer illegal immigrants identification cards that would let them open bank accounts and use other services that may be unavailable without driver's licenses or state-issued IDs.
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DMV officials tell colleagues that now's the time to start plotting ways to counteract negative messages about the forthcoming ID cards.
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Invoking a global threat of terrorism, the British government announced plans on Tuesday to introduce national identity cards for the first time since the Second World War.
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The UK government will store electronic records of people entering and leaving the UK in effort to tighten border control.
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Straight answers not compulsory either For the third time in four days, Gordon Brown has sown doubts about the future of compulsory ID cards for UK citizens. Speaking at prime minister's question time today, Brown confirmed that it was "policy" for ID cards to become compulsory, but added the rider that this was subject to a vote in parliament.â¦
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The costs of the ID cards scheme can be cut "quite substantially" by using existing databases, says a minister.
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The Home Secretary is to publish detailed plans for the controversial national identity card.
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Britain said on Tuesday it plans to force non-European foreign nationals to register identity details such as fingerprints and iris scans from 2008.
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City officials have approved a plan to offer illegal immigrants identification cards that would let them open bank accounts and use other services that may be unavailable without driver's licenses or state-issued IDs.
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The home secretary, Charles Clarke, yesterday warned MPs that the government would bring in compulsory identity cards once a voluntary system had been accepted by the British public.
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Proposals for identity cards and a population register are opposed by Britain's information watchdog.
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New measures to fight crime and drugs are expected to be at the heart of the Queen&#39;s Speech on Tuesday. The creation of national ID cards, new measures against &quot;yobs&quot; and drug tests for minor offenders are set to feature.
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Costs tied to the country's controversial biometric ID card plan will cause the price of new passports to soar.
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Plans for a new compulsory ID card scheme are unveiled during the Queen's Speech.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â