Oct 132008
I have acquired my first passport. Hopefully they will return my birth certificate soon. I have plans to visit the Mexican Riviera this year for a cruise with my girlfriend and it turns out that in order to go on the cruise, I need a passport.
I wonder if there’s a Visa stamp for entering/exiting Mexico proper. I know that there isn’t for travelling to/from Tiajuana. I went there as a child once, and was subjected to Montazuma’s revenge. (My dad did not think to mention that drinking the local water could end that way, and certainly did not think that ice cubes are made of water, ergo, having ice cubes in my soda might result in the same thing… Amazingly enough, my dad was not brilliant, hardworking and driven… but not brilliant.)
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Sounds exciting; a cruise sounds like a nice way to see more of the country. I know Jennifer was warning me when we were looking at renewing passports– does yours have RFID?
Yup, sure does
You’re a lot more tuned into security than I am– is it something that you need to protect, or is the info harmless? I think J was looking at little wallet/pouches to block the RFID to make it harder to skim the info, but I don’t think we bothered to actually purchase it. [Mine's the old version... through 2011 when it'll be time to renew it again. It's definately time for a photo update...]
The E-Passport as it is called includes both the information that is available inside the passport itself as well as an encrypted copy of your biometrics (digital photograph for use with facial recognition software). The E-Passport FAQ states that the passport itself is comprised of RF-blocking material, which means that the passport must be opened in order to be read electronically. Additionally, the RFID is built to initiate a CHAP (or Challenge-Handshake Access Protocol) session (they didn’t specify the CHAP type) to verify that the RF reader is authorized to request the information from the RFID chip. They also built in some kind of pseudo-random number generator (they say random number generator, but I doubt it’s truly random) that changes the unique ID used in the session between the E-Passport and the RF Reader. This last feature is intended to prevent your sessions from being intercepted and used to track your travels. The rest of the security built in to the E-Passport deals primarily with anti-counterfeiting and is not relevant to securing your personal information.
If you’re dedicated to preventing others from accessing your RFID, Wired tells you how. However, they have a weak warning about how tampering with your Passport is punishable by up to 25 years in jail.