(((This isn't much of a hack, but it's got denial-of-service potential.
Suppose it's the China Olympics and there's a huge stream of electronic passport holders streaming through the customs gates at high speed. A gang of confederates could hack five or six scanners at the same time, and log-jam important events.)))
Link: Scan This Guy's E-Passport and Watch Your System Crash .
A German security researcher who demonstrated last year that he could clone the computer chip in an electronic passport has revealed additional vulnerabilities in the design of the new documents and the inspection systems used to read them.
Lukas Grunwald, (((I'm unsurprised to see him turn up again))) an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport consultant to the German parliament, says the security flaws allow someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.
Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to approve expired or forged passports.
"If you're able to crash something you are most likely able to exploit it," says Grunwald, who's scheduled to discuss the vulnerabilities this weekend at the annual DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas....
