Forged Elvis Passport

A group of hackers has released a video showing a forged Elvis Presley passport — the RFID-protected kind that can be scanned by computers — being run through and accepted by a Dutch airport security machine.

See for yourself:



The Hacker’s Choice says it used source code intended for the backing up of RFID passports to create the fake credential. “The weakness is in the way the system has been rolled out,” the group writes in a blog posting. “The terminal accepts self-signed data.”

Border control apparently uses different scanners, so the forged passport may or may not work everywhere. Still, it’s a bit jarring to see how easily Elvis could get through at an airport.

The group’s proposed solution? Go back to human-centric security.

“Never let a computer do a job that can be done by a human,” they say. “We know that humans are good at border control. In the end they protected us well for the last 120 years. We also know that humans are good at pattern matching and image recognition. Humans also do an excellent job ‘assessing’ the person and not just the passport. Take the human part away and passport security falls apart.”