Advantages of e-passport | Disadvantages of electronic passport
This page covers advantages and disadvantages of e-passport (Electronic passport). It mentions benefits or advantages of e-passport and drawbacks or disadvantages of e-passport.
Introduction: Use of paper based passports have increased risk of security threats. These passports can be made with the help of counterfeit documents. Morover it can easily be altered which leads to identity fraud and unauthorized access. To solve all these security concerns, e-passports or digital passports have been developed.
What is e-passport ?
The passport which contains electronic chip is called electronic passport (e-passport). This chip houses biometric information of the passport holder such as iris, fingerprints, facial information etc. It also stores other useful informations of the passport holder which include name, birth date, present address, photograph etc. This e-passport stores digitally signed personal particulars of the individual on the chip. The first e-passport was introduced in 1998 by Malaysia. US Government has introduced e-passports in 2006.
The common features of e-passport are as follows.
• Chip contains memory with 64 Kilobytes of size.
• Can store informations of about 30 visits.
• Embossed holographic image
• Biometric and demographic informations of the holder.
• Stores iris and fingerprints of the bearer.
• Stores colour photograph and digital signature of the bearer.
Advantages of e-passport
Following are the benefits or advantages of e-passport:
➨It reduces threat of identity fraud by increasing security features in it.
➨It embeds biometric informations such as fingerprint, iris and face. These information helps to identify individual carrying e-passport.
➨It helps in detection of counterfeit documents.
➨It makes it very difficult to alter the e-passports. Hence it restricts admission of unauthorized individuals to any country on fake documents.
➨It protects privacy of the citizens.
➨Tempering of the chip is notified to the system which results into passport authentication failure.
➨It can be scanned in few seconds which avoids long wait for passengers.
Disadvantages of e-passport
Following are the limitations or drawbacks or disadvantages of e-passport:
➨Contactless RFID embedded chips can be read using radio frequency from few centimeters away.
Unprotected chips are subject to clandestine scanning or eavesdropping.
➨E-passports use standard ISO 14443 which generates unique chip ID during protocol initiation.
Using this unique chip ID, e-passport holder can be tracked by unauthorized parties.
➨Digital signatures used in e-passports do not bind data to any particular chip used on passport.
Hence it does not offer any defense for passport cloning.
➨E-passport supports automation which can lead to biometric data-leakage and consecutively weakens
human oversight.
➨Passport to reader communication should be authenticated and encrypted which is optional mechanism as
per ICAO guidelines. If it is not implemented then it may lead to cryptographic weaknesses between
passport and reader.