Comments on: How to Hack the RFID Passport Chip

By: Antidote

Antidote — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:08:40 +0000

Wake up guys….

http://www.infowars.com

By: kongol

kongol — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:20:00 +0000

To Max. Smash your passport with a hammer or blunt object. this will disable the chip!

By: Chainsaw

Chainsaw — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:26:59 +0000

Truthfully I don’t see the value or utility in it. Increasing the quality of their tools isn’t going to increase the quality of our government, and the quality of tools isn’t, and historically hasn’t been, the limiting factor. Or more bluntly, we don’t have a problem that this will help solve.

If you look back through history, as much good as harm has come from people being able to transcend the limitations imposed on them by their government in an emergency. Ask the Jews about passports that can be turned off by the government.

Sometimes, it’s more important that we be able to get somewhere irrespective of our governments’ desires, just as it is sometimes more important that we help enforce the law than that we protect our employer’s corporate interest.

It is in our interest to see that our government remains controllable by us, not vice versa.

To disable the chip – you could try microwaving it for a second or two. The chip might pop and leave a burned hole in the passport, but it would be disabled Or take it with you to your next MRI scan. Or visit someone who builds giant Tesla coils.

But I would think that if they expected a chip in your passport and there wasn’t one, you might have a LONG wait at the border.

By: Max Hartshorne

Max Hartshorne — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:27:04 +0000

I have a friend who is traveling to Cuba. SHould she try to hack her 2008-issued RFID chip US passport? Is this necessary if she goes to a place like Cuba where she’s not supposed to go?

I still dont’ see how one disables this chip. Do you know how?

By: Ken Savage

Ken Savage — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:27:53 +0000

hey Char Lyn, nice to see ya again.

Yea the older passports seem to have a visible chip inside the back cover but the new passports have an RFID chip inside the passport’s bridge from what I can research here on the net.

By: Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:36:48 +0000

I’ve messed with these things before and and it isn’t difficult at all to start hacking. As you stated, these readers are inexpensive and the technical know-how isn’t beyond most computer programmers. While PKI is great, offering up your encrypted data is still insane, even if it is hard to decrypt. Cloning is simple in this case and anyone with a month’s practice using a reader would be able to figure it out. Someone who experimented with antennas a bit could probably pick up a few hundred in an airport within a few minutes, take the data with them, and then decrypt it in their spare time, or just used the cloned data. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is already going on.

What should have been done in addition to PKI is using a password encrypted sector, with the password being sent (and changed) each time, where the password itself is encrypted by the reader using a unique public key provided by the RFID chip. And even this would probably be hacked via brute force.

Or we could just do without the technology.

By: Char Lyn

Char Lyn — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:09:35 +0000

I feel the urgent need to check and see if my passport has an RFID chip in it. I just got it last year so I could meet my in-laws who live in Croatia, but I thought I did so before they started implementing them. Yikes.