Biometric Passports: Are They Really More Secure?

Hackers Expose Airport Security Risks With Elvis Passport And Automated Photo Scanning Passport Machine

On February 23^rd, 2010, CNN published a story about two men who call themselves “ethical hackers.” In an effort to highlight weaknesses in current airport security measures, Adam Laurie and Jeroen Van Beek exposed how easy it is to fool a passport scanner with a fraudulent biometric chip. Laurie and Van Beek used a doctored passport at a self-serve passport machine in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to clear a very special passenger for travel. That passenger’s name was Elvis Presley.

Within seconds of approaching the passport scanner, passenger Elvis Presley was cleared for travel. A photograph of The King, which had been stored on a computer chip inside the doctored passport, even appeared on the display monitor as “Elvis” was granted permission to travel.

As Laurie and Van Beek have clearly shown with this experiment, automated airport security isn’t working.

Biometric passports, which are designed to increase security, are currently standard issue in the United States, Europe, and dozens of other countries from Iraq to Australia. Also known as e-passports, these passports differ from their traditional paper-only predecessors by including electronic microprocessor chips that store the carrier’s biometrics – unique physical characteristics that can identify a specific individual – embedded in the front or back cover, or center page, of the passports. The passport’s critical information, such as the carrier’s name and photograph, are both printed on passport’s data page in the traditional way, and stored inside the computer chip.

Currently, the most standardized biometrics used for this type of identification system are facial recognition and fingerprints. When a person applies for a new passport, his or her biometrics are digitized using photo scanning technology, and saved onto the microchip that is embedded in the passport. This technology has indeed made passports somewhat more difficult to fake, but Laurie and Van Beek have proved that biometric passports remain vulnerable to fraud, especially when they are checked by automated passport scanning systems instead of human beings.

Although most countries use a combination border control officers and automated passport scanning by computers, Laurie and Van Beek suggest that reliance on computers is unsafe. After all, no human border control officer would have approved Elvis Presley for travel without at least thinking twice about it. The automated scanners can check a traveler’s facial imagine by photo scanning his or her face and comparing it to the embedded photo in the computer chip. If the two match, the traveler can walk right through. The problem is that these chips are not invulnerable to tampering. Laurie told CNN that the combination of biometric passports and automated scanners has “actually made the borders weaker, not stronger.”