EU moons mass migration with border biometrics
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Want to become a European? Tough The Brussels government is working on plans for a range of aggressive new border-control measures designed to prevent mass migration into Europe - particularly from points south and east.â¦
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Retinal scans, finger printing or facial recognition get most of the publicity but researchers across the world are quietly labouring away at alternative types of biometrics.
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The European Union's top justice official on Friday proposed replicating U.S. border security measures in Europe, with plans to fingerprint and electronically record the entry and exit of all visitors.
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All visitors from Europe and  elsewhere were fingerprinted and photographed upon arrival at  U.S. airports on Thursday as part of a new, heightened effort  by authorities to secure American borders.
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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
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The US Department of Homeland Security unveiled new computer workstations Thursday that allow Border Patrol agents on the Canadian and Mexican borders to tap into the FBI&#39;s fingerprint database, overcoming a technological hurdle that
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The EU is presenting a 'blue card' that would aim to attract skilled workers to Europe and regulate immigration.
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The European Commission will propose tomorrow that all foreign travelers into and out of Europe, including U.S. citizens, should be fingerprinted. If approved by the European Parliament, the measure would mean that precisely identifying information on tens of millions of citizens will be added in...
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Europeans enjoy greater privacy rights than U.S. citizens under Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System. In 27B Stroke 6.
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Safend, an international provider of endpoint i
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Big companies exploring ways to verify identities online
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An intelligent system that can recognise the content in photos and videos is being developed by researchers.
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Scientists with the Genographic Project create a huge database of DNA information to track the path of human movement across the globe.
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Foreign visitors at the 50 busiest land border crossings in 10 states are now being fingerprinted as part of the government's new biometric screening system, the Homeland Security Department announced on Monday.
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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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The European Commission will propose tomorrow that all foreign travelers entering and leaving Europe, including U.S. citizens, should be fingerprinted. If approved by the European Parliament, the measure would mean that precisely identifying information on tens of millions of citizens will be added...
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Visitors could face digital fingerprinting at airports under plans to beef up border security