Biometric passports are easily cracked
All EU countries have a shared passport standard, as decided back in 2003. In the newer passports there are a datachip (RFID*) where a picture of the owner is stored as a jpeg image. These passports are called "Biometric passports".
Now, these passports were supposed to be harder to forge, but a group of hackers have shown just how easy it is.
On a video posted on the internet they show how they place a forged passport through a scanner on an airport in the Netherlands. On the screen a picture along with the personal details of Elvis Aaron Presley shows up and the passport is validated as genuine by the scanner.
The group of hackers calls themselves "The Hacker's Choice". They have posted the code of an application that allows anyone to forge this kind passports. The code is now spreading on the internet. The main reason for doing this is to show that computers should not be involved in airport security and should be considered a security flaw.
- "We know that humans are good at boarder control. They have done a good job protected us the last 120 years. We also know that humans are good at recognizing patterns and images. Humans also evaluates another person, and not just the passport. Remove the human and all security in passports disappear."
In all new EU-passports information is stored in an RFID-chip along with the passport picture. The point is to make them harder to forge. A new encryption standard is under development to protect the information stored, but there are no time estimations made at this time on when it is ready.
*RFID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification