Fraud threat to new Aust e-passports
New Australian e-passports are vulnerable to fraud, according to a German computer security researcher who has been able to clone new European electronic passports.
Lukas Grunwald demonstrated his cloning at a DefCon Security Conference in Las Vegas, by cloning data encoded on the radio frequency (identification) RFID chip of an EU passport and placing it on another chip.
The problem exists with any other passport- Australia’s included – that follows the global standard set by the United Nations Civil Aviation Organisation and does not use encryption to prevent the data from being read.
Mr Grunwald says the Australian e-passport system is even more vulnerable to fraud because the Government plans to use automated entry with them – passport stations without a person to administer them.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has countered by saying the system works with facial identification as well, but Grunwald says that facial recognition has a 25-30% failure rate. It also says that it is not possible to modify or manipulate data once it has been copied.
