British Passport - Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities

According to The Guardian, the information contained on a biometric passport can be viewed using readily available hardware and software. Information is stored in encrypted form on an RFID tag, with the password as a combination of information written on the passport, so that anyone with access to the passport will be able to read the chip. The passport is also vulnerable to brute force attacks. And, because it is possible to read the RFID tags remotely at a distance of several centimetres, it is not necessary to be in possession of the passport to extract the data.

This makes cloning of the passport possible. Because the biometric passport is supposedly highly secure and therefore trusted, it is thought that the holder of a cloned passport might be more likely to escape detection than the holder of a traditional passport.