The Biometric Passport Of Australia

Introduced in October 2005, the biometric passport of Australia is a document with a microchip attached to it

. The information contained in the microchip contains personal information of the passport holder, which is the information on the color photo page of the ePassport and a digitized photograph.

For adults, the passport has a total of thirty-five pages and costs Aus$226 to be manufactured. This passport is valid for the ten years after date of issuance. For children, the cost of the passport is Aus$113 and is valid for five years after issuance. For a frequent international traveler, the passport has sixty-seven pages and costs Aus$340 to manufacture with a validity of ten years from issuance.

There are many reasons why Australia has opted to use biometrics for its passport system. Because of the experiences of the post 9/11 world, heightened security measures need to be undertaken. One of the best ways is through biometric technology allowing for faster immigration processing together with enhanced facial recognition software to weed out undesirables from entering Australia.

The current biometric technologies allow the encryption and storage of personal information, such as facial recognition data, fingerprint recognition data and iris recognition data. In ePassports to Australia, a digitized format of the face is what is actually stored for immigration control purposes.

Because these ePassports are in the possession of the individual, there are many security concerns that become present. Thus as a countermeasure, biometric passports have been equipped with specific mechanisms to prevent fraud or attack.

1.Non-traceable chip characteristics. These are random chip identifiers that reply to each request with a different chip number. These random identifiers prevent tracing of particular passport chips to prevent copying and data fraud;

2.Basic Access Control protects the communication channel between the chip and the reader through the encryption of transmitted information. Before data is read from the ePassport, the reader needs to provide a key to unlock the encoded information. Without the key, the information cannot be unlocked;

3.Passive Authentication prevents the modification of the passport chip information. This system has a file that stores hash values of all files stored in the chip together with a digital signature that is unlocked through a key in both the document signing system and the country signing system;

4.Active Authentication prevents the cloning of passport chips. In the chip is a key which cannot be read or copied but its existence can be proven;

5.Extended Access Control adds the security to check the authenticity of both the chip and the reader to increase security for the information contained in the microchip;

6.Chip Shielding prevents the unauthorized reading of the microchip through a sheath or mesh on the chip itself.

by: Bobby Castro

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