ID card rollout begins

[Tony Naggs]

Hi Charles

2008/9/25 Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk>
>
> Does anyone know whether it is possoble for anyone (with suitable equipment) to view the biometric data (mainly a photograph AIUI) on the current British Passports?


Yes, there is an ICAO document that describes the process & it uses
standard ISO14443 contactless card readers.  It is encrypted, so you
need to run the OCR data on the back page in front of a PC - as the
key is based on stuff like name, date of birth, passport expiry date,
...

For reading passports without seeing the OCR data; people have
reported success in reducing the search space by estimating age and
knowing that existing biometric passports have only been issued over a
fairly short period of time.

Google should find lots of details, but maybe start with this article
on Belgian passports:
http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/crypto/passport/index.html

ttfn,
Tony