Fitting passports with biometric data

Electronic passports also contain several layers of tamper-proofing to prevent criminals or others from removing the chip or altering data stored in its embedded memory, which is a nonstandard form of nonvolatile memory. Changes in temperature or light will shut the chip down. Borchert would not disclose other antitampering techniques embodied in the chips.

"Getting into these chips is going to take more than your average bear. There will be MIT students who do it, but it probably won't be widespread," said Jim Handy, an analyst at Semico Research. "You will have to know how the chip is encrypted and how it is programmed."

Borchert acknowledged that the system isn't perfect and inevitably would be vulnerable to attacks, but he said it improves on existing security policies.

More work to be done
It is a technology still in its infancy. The United States, for instance, recently extended the deadline for 21 nations in a visa waiver program to begin to incorporate biometrics into passports. The cutoff was originally set for October; it's been pushed back a year.

And still to be worked out is how to reconcile the rapid progress of the chip industry with the slower pace of government agencies -- in the United States, for example, passports get renewed every 10 years. Looming questions, Handy said, include whether older chips will become easy to crack and whether older passports would be compatible with new systems.

The chips also need to be thin enough to fit inside a passport cover and be outfitted with antennae.

Then there's the way passports get handled. Over their lifespan, the documents get bent, sweated on and pounded with border-crossing stamps.

"Durability is perhaps the single biggest unknown," Kefauver said.

In addition, facial recognition is considered less accurate than other forms of biometric authentication, according to security experts. And global interoperability of equipment needs to be put in place, as does a coordination of national practices. Some nations may adopt algorithms that compare the geometry of the nose bridge between the live person and the stored ID image, while others may compare the larger, facial triangle.

Electronic passports also don't solve one of the key problems with passport issuance: birth certificates. In the United States alone, there are thousands of legitimate forms of birth documents, and they are not linked through a uniform methodology, Kefauver said.

But the biggest hurdle, despite the assurances of security experts, could be public perception.

"Unless public acceptance of biometric (authentication) occurs, forget the rest," Kefauver said.