Monday, September 15, 2008

Security threats of Biometric E - Passports in India

Mr Pranab Mukherjee, External Affairs Minister of India has declared that E-Passports and Biometric passports will be availiable and issued to general public by september 2009.

This will surely help the government to issue passports quickly but the problem lies in the technology, The Biometric passport experiment by the United States and other countries have already been under the ire of hackers.

It has been proved that the biometric passports have been cloned even while they were lying in the bag of the holder, no need to have the passport in your hand.

The new version of passports were released by British government which said was said to be "FakeProof" even that was not of any use, the FakeProof Passports were cloned in minutes of launch.

If the biometric e-passports launched by India are cloned, it can be misused and that can lead to bad consequences like identity theft, flee from one country to other and sky is limit to do frauds with these cloned passports.

Now with the growing threats of Cybercrime, Hacking incidents from China and other countries, Terrorists using Open Wifi and Governments dependence on technology is not going to be easy.

Indian government needs to think about how they are going to do it and no matter how foolproof and secure the technology is we know it can be breached. There is major challenge for the government in so agressive adoption of technology and with the technology even the law needs to be updated because the IT Act 2000 is quite outdated the recent amendments are not enough to cover the new threats and challenges standing ahead of us.

-Abhiz

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