Secure, encrypted e-passports will be available later this year

A new high-tech passport era is dawning.

Starting toward the end of this year and progressing through next, the new generation of passports issued by the U.S. State Department will be electronic.

E-passports, as they are called, are not to be confused with airline e-tickets, which are merely a piece or pieces of paper. E-passports will look much the same as today’s machine-readable passports with the familiar gold-embossed blue cover. But they will contain an electronic chip with uniquely encoded biometric information (a facial photograph) – a coil, or antenna, if you will – embedded into the back cover.

The encoded chip will duplicate the information that’s on the passport’s data page: digitized photo, name, birth date, place of birth, nationality, etc. The e-passport also will incorporate codes and additional anti-fraud and security features.

With today’s thin technology, the chip, coil and metallic security shield will not add any detectable thickness to the cover.

Developing a secure e-passport has not been without snafus. The biggest problems have centered on privacy issues caused by the way the International Civil Aviation Organization specs were presented, according to Neville Pattinson, director of business development, technology and government affairs for Axalto, an Austin, Texas-based technology firm developing an e-passport.

“The specs allowed the information in the passport to be read without any security access controls,” he said in a telephone interview.

Axalto – said to be the world’s leading provider of microprocessor cards, and one of three finalists bidding for the passport chip contract – works with several federal agencies on identity management, security and biometrics.

Pattinson identified two e-passport security problems that cropped up in the early development phases: skimming and eavesdropping attacks.

“In real terms you shouldn’t be able to electronically read an e-passport from more than a few inches,” he said. He noted, however, that someone with the right apparatus could electronically “skim” information from the passport from one to two feet away without the user knowing.

The second problem, said Pattinson, was the remote possibility of eavesdropping. He said that in an environment such as an airport check-in counter, somebody with an antenna and receiver 30 feet away could intercept data transmitted by radio waves between a reader and passport.

“We’ve introduced security technology to deal with both of those attacks,” Pattinson said. “Now, the passport chip, which gets its power from a radio transmission applied to it from the passport reader, has to be awakened. What we’ve done is to make the chip very unhelpful until it gets a certain code sent to it through the radio.”

In order to get to that code, the passport needs to be opened to the data page – the one with the photo, other printed information and two lines of characters that run horizontally across the page. The reader scans the characters, finds the code that’s unique to the passport and awakens the chip.

“We also added a secondary feature, which encrypts that code,” said Pattinson. “Any information the passport reader requests from the passport is encrypted when it goes through the radio circuit into radio waves, so when it is received, the reader can decrypt it and make sense of it. But while it’s in the radio environment it’s gobbledygook to anybody trying to eavesdrop.”

When an immigration officer holds an e-passport over a reader, he or she will be able to view you, your passport’s data page and the digital information embedded in the chip on a monitor to make certain the document has not been altered. A government digital signature also verifies the correctness of the passport information. The whole passport screening process should take no more than five seconds.

Angela Aggeler, spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, said a pilot program is under way using a document with built in security, and additional security features are being considered that are similar to those developed by Axalto.

“We hope to begin initial production of the regular e-passports by the end of this year, and to have full implementation by the end of next year,” Aggeler said.

“Anyone applying for a new passport would get an e-passport by the end of next year, but it’s going to take some time to implement the full production of the e-passport, which is why there’s a gap between the end of this year and the end of next year. Some people applying for a new passport at the end of this year, depending on where they are, also might get a new e-passport.”

For U.S. citizens who already have a passport, it will remain valid for its 10-year duration.

There were 8.8 million passports issued in the U.S. in 2004, an increase of 1.5 million over 2003. Aggeler said the number is expected to climb to at least 10 million this year.

“A passport is the best thing you can have in terms of establishing who you are and your citizenship, and people seem to be realizing this,” she said.

In addition, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 requires that by Jan. 1, 2008, travelers to and from the Caribbean, Bermuda, Panama, Mexico and Canada have a passport or other secure, accepted documents (special cards used by frequent Canada and Mexico border crossers) to enter or re-enter the U.S.

Citizens age 16 and older applying for a passport should note the price is now $97 – $55 for the passport fee, $12 for a security surcharge and a $30 execution fee. New passports for those under 16 are $82. Fee for a passport renewal is $67.