EU biometric passports not that safe, experts say

included on the chip can still be fooled, however. “Fingerprints are possible to fake for a low cost. The easiest way is to obtain a print from something someone has touched, a glass or a mobile phone.”

From this you can extract a picture of the ridges that you see on your fingertip. This picture can be molded onto a piece of plastic, which can then be subtly placed on the fingertip during enrollment or verification of the data to make you appear like someone else.

Even retina scans are not impossible to fake. “This is difficult. The process involves taking a picture of the retina with infrared light at very close distance. But it is still not impossible. You could hold some kind of eye-like object with a picture of the retina in front of the camera. Of course if the process is supervised, it then becomes quite difficult.”

Svenningson says that this supervision, making sure that the photo, fingerprints, and other biometric data are captured at the same moment that you apply for a passport: “So that all the data is tied together and impossible for the applicant to alter.”

“It’s very important to have the whole enrollment process take place in one sequence via an officially supervised process. Any time you break up this sequence, you introduce a window for individuals to undermine the security of the passport.”

Phillips notes that Svenningson’s business model is precisely that — all-in-one biometric data capture — so he has an interest in suggesting its importance. He jokes that photography shops, which do not sell as many rolls of film any more and for which the €8 set of four passport photos is an increasingly substantial part of their business, do not particularly like the idea.

It will still take many years before even the current generation of e-passports is widely adopted.

Five to ten year window

“When it comes to non-biometric passports, there is an even weaker tie between the document and its holder, and while biometric passports are common now, the large bulk of EU passports in circulation are non-biometric because they aren’t out of date yet, and won’t be for a number of years. It will take at least another five to 10 years for all EU passports to be biometric.”

Still, nothing will be able to stop those who have the time and money to invest in counterfeiting, he said: “The intelligence services have the expenses and the capacity to do this.”

A few weeks ago the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at the Mossad in the 1980s, who said that the Israeli spy agency had its own “passport factory,” a company established within the Mossad headquarters. “They create various types of papers, every kind of ink. It’s a very, very expensive research department,” he said.