One Year Later, U.S. E-Passport's Architect Says System Is a Success

Q: How do you see the e-passport program changing in the future?

A: The e-passport marks the beginning of the migration of the passport away from being a paper-based document, toward one that has an integrated chip. I feel that embedding a chip into the passport opens the door—over time, perhaps over the next five to seven years—toward additional functionality being assigned to that chip. For example, right now when you travel abroad, you get a rubber stamp that says you were here or there. Perhaps over time, as the chips become faster, have more memory, and we add the ability to write data to them, we may be able to do entry and exit stamps on the passport, electronically, saving them to the chip, rather than stamping them in the book.

There would be several advantages to this. For one, it would give border inspectors access to an instantaneous history of where the person has been, so they won't have to look through the pages of the passport book. It also has the advantage of making the passport a more modern document, and perhaps, one that is even less susceptible to fraud, even in terms of entry caches and things like that, because they would be electronic, as opposed to a stamp.

As e-passports become more common around the world, and as more countries buy more readers [required to read the data on the embedded chips], you'll also see evolutions in the border inspection process. What happens now is that you hand the passport to the inspector, the machine-readable part is read, the chip is unlocked and the data pops up on the inspector's computer screen. Because it is [an] ISO 14443-compliant tag, you're never going to be able to read it from a distance—but what if, rather than having the chip read at the time you hand the passport to the inspector, there was a reader prepositioned in line [to which you'd open and present your passport while waiting in line], so that the inspector would see your data on his or her computer screen when you arrive at the checkpoint? I don't believe this is happening yet, but it certainly is in the realm of possibilities.

I'm not saying we'd take the inspector out of the process. He or she is still going to be there, but to the extent that the inspector can get the data from the chip pulled up on the screen faster, that would let them concentrate more on the passport book and the person presenting it. The behavior of the traveler can be very useful in detecting people who may be a security concern to the United States or other governments.

Q: Some security experts say the data protections used in e-passports—not just those issued by the U.S., but those issued by other countries following the ICAO specifications—have been poorly vetted and are vulnerable to hacking. Just last week, a German hacker named Lukas Grunwald, who last year cloned a passport chip, announced he had crashed two different passport interrogators by bombarding them with data. What is your take on these alleged shortcomings?

A: Cloning the chip is possible—it's essentially taking a digital photocopy of a chip. But cloning a chip doesn't mean you've made a fake passport that will get you into a country. [U.S.] passports also use watermarks, ultraviolet and infrared security features. And at the end of the day, you have the inspector doing checks on the passport and on you. If a reader were to crash because of the passport you were carrying, it would mean you'd be inspected more carefully.