British biometric passport hacked

Lukas Grunwald, a consultant with a German security company, claims to have discovered a method for cloning the information stored in the new passports.

Speaking to the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Grunswald said that data can be transferred onto blank chips, which could then be implanted in fake passports.

It has cost the UK more than £415m to load passports with information such as fingerprints, facial scans and iris patterns.

Apparently the same hack can be used to turn over the UK government's plan for a national ID card.

Grunwald was able to hack the card in two weeks using hardware worth £105. A spokesman from the Home Office said that the UK biometric passport was one of the most secure in the world and while it might be possible to copy the chip data it was not possible to modify or manipulate any of the data.

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