Fitting passports with biometric data
Published: 18 Aug 2004 15:45 BST
Fingerprints -- despite providing the most accurate means of identifying a person -- were ruled out because of the criminal overtones. Governments worried that their citizens would feel like they were being arrested.
"Australia, Canada and the US ruled it out right away," said Kefauver, the former US official, who chaired the technology working group on this issue for ICAO.
If nations begin to adopt electronic passports, the process of boarding an international flight will take on a slightly different feel. Customs agents will examine a passport and then request that a traveller stand in a particular spot, where a facial recognition device will then scan that person's face. Customs agents will then swipe the electronic passport past a reader.
A positive match would permit a traveller to proceed, while a mismatch would lead to further ID checks. In the United States and possibly other countries, the two images would also be correlated to an image in a remote database. If a nation required it, fingerprints or iris scans could also be taken.
How it differs from RFID
Technologically, the chips proposed for passports are more sophisticated than standard RFID, or radio-frequency identification, tags, said Infineon's Borchert. RFID technology, a kind of high-tech bar code, is being adopted by retailers to keep tabs on their merchandise and, in more extreme cases, it's being promoted as a way to identify people.
First, the distance at which an e-passport chip can be read is far shorter. Though readers can wake up some RFID tags from as far away as 400 feet, depending on the reader and the tag, the reader in Infineon's ID system has to be as close as 10.5 centimetres, or about four inches, to obtain information.
Second, unlike many RFID tags, e-passport chips come with a built-in encryption engine. Even if hackers could obtain one reading, they would have to take repeated readings before they could translate the data coming out of the chip from encrypted gobbledygook into actual information. Even then, at least in the passport chips, the thieves would only be able to get a digital image of someone's face.
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