As someone who has been meaning to get their passport renewed for a while now, I definitely will hurry to do so before the end of the year. Why you ask? Well, apparently any yahoo will be able to walk by your passport and get your name, address, date of birth, etc. once unencrypted RFID tags are integrated with them starting next year. Make no mistake - this is a very bad idea. Admittedly, mass encryption schemes with TSA employees in charge would be ticking time bombs of failure, but at least provide some challenge to the naive stalker / thief. This really seems like the wrong technology for the job. Whatever happened to smart cards?
Posted by boo at October 26, 2004 11:39 PM | TrackBackI'm pretty skeptical about the Wired article... as far as I know, an "advanced" RFID tag right now is only capable of holding 128 bits of information. That's no where near the 64 kilobytes of data the "RFID" tag in the article is supposed to hold.
I guess It's possible that Wired is calling some other wireless technology "RFID". Still, what's the use of wireless with a passport? A plain old magnetic strip would seem to be far more inexpensive, durable, and secure.
Posted by: lurp at October 28, 2004 05:46 PM