Remember some time back I had reported about the Dutch RFID passports getting cracked and then a few days back it was the turn of VeriChip getting cloned. In continuation of this some hackers from Germany have gone ahead and cloned the RFID passports which would be issued by U.S. and a host of other countries.

This time the credit goes to Lukas Grunwald who spent around two weeks figuring out the hack and gathered knowledge from the publicly available e-passport standards on the International Civil Aviation Organization's official website. The whole process of cloning was displayed by Lukas and he even copied the data to a corporate smartcard which when slipped between the normal RFID chip and the reader allowed him to have a physical passport that differs from his RFID passport.

As most of the countries would be conducting physical inspections in order to match everything and since the information on the passports could not be modified so there is no need to worry but what about the security offered by these countries which has let down on a number of occasions.