As researchers continue to develop the Semantic Web, major privacy issues could arise because of the confluence of multiple sources of data about people and places, according to Hugh Glaser of the University of Southampton, though he admits that it will be several years before even the Semantic Web programs that have already been developed become available to the public. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989, it was impossible to predict how integral it would become to everyday life. The current Web has major limitations, however, including the fact that the majority of its information cannot be read by a computer. Developers of the Semantic Web are trying to bring order to the jumble of photographs, calendars, public records, and other items so that computers can create a coherent and composite statement of a person, place, or thing. "Imagine if you can link real-time prescription data for flu remedies with geographical data," said Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton. "You can do real-time epidemiology and see flu outbreaks as they happen." The Semantic Web could also create personalized weather forecasts with information provided by global positioning systems. While the extended reach of the Semantic Web would make for a much smarter platform, it could also tap into confidential information as it searches for multiple sources, such as health records, purchasing histories, or contact information. "All of this data is public data already," said Glaser. "The problem comes when it is processed." That said, researchers will have many years to address the security concerns, and some argue that rather than presenting an entirely new problem, the Semantic Web merely complicates the security concerns that already plague the existing Web.
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Politicos Ponder Patent System Changes
CNet (05/23/06) Broache, Anne

The highly publicized lawsuits involving eBay and the BlackBerry have prompted Congress to reconsider the technology industry's calls to fix what it describes as a broken patent system. Though much of the Senate has been focused on a pending immigration bill, an intellectual property panel that included independent inventors, representatives from a major technology company, a pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturer, and academics convened within the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose leaders admitted that they had a lot of work ahead of them to reach a solution. A spokesperson for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the panel, said the senator has been at work on a bill since at least last year but has no plan for when it will be introduced. The session dealt primarily with reforming patent litigation, including the creation of a method for the public to comment on the validity of recently granted patents outside of the courts, though there was little agreement on how such a system should be implemented. Though the technology and pharmaceutical industries share little common ground in the area of patent reform, they did agree on the need for some form of that system to be administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, known as "post-grant opposition." Under the system, the public would have a predetermined period of time to contest a patent that would hopefully cut down on the amount of time and resources consumed by litigation. Representatives from the technology and financial services industries argued that there should be a second window for disputing patents because the proposed times of six to nine months would not give companies in those industries enough of a chance to comb through the thousands of patents that could relate to their own products.
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Too Much for NSA to Mine?
Government Computer News (05/22/06) Vol. 25, No. 13,Wait, Patience

The controversy over the NSA's covert program of collecting data on millions of phones calls placed by normal citizens begs the question of how well the agency will actually be able to mine the vast quantities of information it is amassing. Although the NSA is not revealing any details about its databases or the technologies that it is using to maintain and search them, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that AT&T's Daytona call detail record (CDR) database, which was reportedly made accessible to the NSA, exceeds 312 TB. Assuming that figure is accurate and that Verizon and BellSouth provided access to databases of similar sizes, the NSA could have more than 900 TB of data on its hands, requiring massive storage capacity, intense computing power, and sophisticated analytical software. Access to the bulk of the database in real time is critical for effective data mining, though some believe the NSA is frozen out of much of its own information by virtue of its sheer size. "My impression--strictly a professional guess--is that at least 75 percent of what NSA 'knows' is...offline and not accessible," said Robert Steele, CEO of OSS.net. "You cannot do good pattern analysis, including historical comparisons, without massive online storage." SGI has begun developing computers with terabyte-scale active memories, the largest containing 13 TB, which is not enough memory to handle even 1.5 percent of the three CDR databases put together. Moreover, a computer's capacity for memory space is limited by its amount of address bits on chips, according to SGI's Bill Mannel. "Some of our customers who already have big-memory databases are looking for something beyond [what they have], but they have power and footprint problems," Mannel said, adding that the storage architecture must be overhauled to incorporate enough RAM to access the entire database.
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Embedded Software Made Simpler Yet More Powerful
IST Results (05/22/06)

A European research team has used high-level Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) languages to achieve a major advance in the development of pervasive computing systems. As part of the ASAP project, researchers at the Technical University of Madrid, Heinrich-Heine University of Dusseldorf, and Roskilde University have used the high-level declarative language Ciao in a series of case studies, including one in which pervasive application kernels were written in Ciao for a wearable computer system. The researchers have developed the CiaoPP toolkit in an effort to create specialized programs that are automatically optimized for specific processing and resource needs. "Software created with the toolkit is comparable in terms of resource demands to code written in C if it is designed to do the same thing," says German Puebla, ASAP project coordinator and a researcher at the Madrid university. Until now, low-level languages such as C have been the focus of researchers due to concerns about efficiency and resource demands of code. Software will need to be interoperable and efficient if multiple distributed platforms are to communicate at a high level, such as having computers integrated and embedded in appliances around a home. Puebla says within five to 10 years pervasive devices will be efficient and affordable for widescale introduction in everyday objects and environments.
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When It Comes to Privacy, Gender Matters
UW News (05/23/06)

Researchers at the University of Washington have found that women are more concerned about security in public places than men are, challenging the notion that people no longer expect their privacy to be respected once they leave their homes. Indeed, almost a quarter of the men and women involved in the study said that any amount of video capture is an invasion of their privacy. Most people in either gender did not object to on-campus video capture, though a majority of women found off-campus surveillance unsettling. Of the nearly 900 people included in the survey, 780 were told beforehand that a camera mounted at the top of a tall campus building was monitoring their movements and relaying the image to a plasma screen set up inside the building. Most men and women did not object to the display within the office, but a majority of women expressed discomfort at the idea of sending their images to an off-campus apartment or some other remote location, suggesting that the university community is perceived as more trustworthy than the outside world. Most men and women agreed that they would not be comfortable with being recorded, as opposed to having their images displayed in real time, though nearly twice as many women as men did have reservations about real-time display. "Over half (55 percent) of the participants we surveyed expressed some concern for having their image in a public place collected and displayed elsewhere," said Peter Kahn, associate professor of psychology and one of the lead authors along with UW Information School professor Batya Friedman, both of which are co-directors of the UW's Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. The study will be published in next month's Journal of Human Computer Interaction.
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Think About It, This Will Make Turning on Your Computer Much Simpler
Times (UK) (05/22/06) Ahuja, Anjana

Researchers involved in the field of EEG (electroencephalogram) biometrics say a brain has its own unique signature and that brain waves can reveal the identity of an individual. Ramaswamy Palaniappan, a computer scientist at the University of Essex, is working to take accurate brain fingerprints. He has conducted a test on alcoholics, and found that their brain output generates a distinctive pattern of electrical pulses in the frequency range of 30 Hertz to 50 Hertz, the gamma band. Julie Thorpe of Carleton University in Ottawa believes "passthoughts" will one day replace passwords for accessing computers, while Swiss Federal Institute of Technology imaging expert Touradj Ebrahimi says brain fingerprinting will rival DNA fingerprinting in the future. However, EEG biometrics researchers may have to find a better way to measure brain waves if brain fingerprinting is to replace conventional fingerprint or iris recognition biometrics. Currently, volunteers are subjected to wearing a gel-smeared skullcap sprouting electrodes that transmit the electrical pulses to a detector. EEG biometrics potentially has high level security applications, such as in military environments, says Palaniappan, who adds that "you can chop off fingers but you can't forge a brain signal."
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Robot Mimics Tongues, Trunks, Tentacles
Discovery Channel (05/22/06) Staedter, Tracy

Researchers working on the OctArm project report that the unconventional robot with flexible joints has successfully grasped objects and clung to them while submerged in rushing water in field tests. OctArm resembles an elephant trunk, in that it is wider at the base and tapered toward the tip, and its movements are based on the muscles that control the tongue, trunks, and tentacles. The scientists use a joystick to move the robot into a coiled shape, or extend its position, through the manipulation of air pressure. "These robots are invertebrate robots and are good at getting into tight spaces and wriggling around," says Ian Walker, a professor of computer and electrical engineering at Clemson University, where his team has been involved in the project for about 10 years. More advanced algorithms will be needed to get OctArm to curl around an object, lift, and perform other complicated motions. The researchers envision a powerful robotic arm that will be able to grasp objects like an elephant or move like a snake, which would be useful in the rubble of a disaster zone or on the surface of a distant planet. Walker's team consists of researchers from eight other institutions, and they will focus on improving the robot's precision and adding sensors and a camera this summer.
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Sex, Politics and the Internet
International Herald Tribune (05/21/06) Shannon, Victoria

Opponents of ICANN's oversight of Internet governance are holding the organization's recent veto of the .xxx domain as further proof that the U.S. government is meddling in the affairs of the Internet. "We see here a first clear case of political interference in ICANN," a spokesman for Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for information society and media, said after the vote. ICANN CEO Paul Twomey was quick to counter, admitting that while objections to the domain were received from numerous governments, including that of the U.S., what ultimately lay behind the decision was the board's doubt that ICM Registry, the Florida company that applied to run dot-xxx, could live up to its pledge to adhere to all international regulations regarding pornography. "The question in the end was how do you scale that?," said Twomey. "The nine votes against were not satisfied that the applicant could do it...It became clear that if we approved this, ICANN would end up being the world's censor," a position the board refused to accept. ICM has appealed the decision. Meanwhile, opponents of ICANN oversight say that potential congressional action on "Net neutrality" is yet another example of the U.S. meddling where it should not. But World Wide Web Consortium director Tim Berners-Lee can see both sides. "I'm not a great enthusiast for legislation or governments trying to control the Internet," he said. "But this legislation is not about government control as much as about preventing corporate control." Nevertheless, Berners-Lee, speaking before the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh this week, says that technology can affect policy issues. He says, "The only reason for introducing technology is a social reason, to support society better. But the implications of technology are not always obvious to people making policy."
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'Google Hacking' Attacks Rising
Massey News (05/19/06)

Researchers at Massey University report that Google hacking attacks are on the rise and that many Web sites in New Zealand are more vulnerable than people suspect. Hackers who use Google's search engine to uncover sensitive personal information pose a threat to businesses, governments, and other organizations that store individuals' data. The study conducted a vulnerability comparison of Web sites in New Zealand with those in Australia, the United States, and the Czech Republic, and found New Zealand's to be the least secure. Using carefully chosen keywords, the researchers ran 170 queries each day for three months, and found that sites with the organizational domain names .co and .org were the most vulnerable. The vulnerabilities remained open for an average of 60.96 days, or 57 percent of the testing period, and the problem is not likely to solve itself. "Security on the Web is likely to remain an ongoing battle," said Ellen Rose, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences. "On the one side, hackers will continue to employ new tactics, using tools like Google in unforeseen ways. Security experts must try to minimize exposure by detecting problems and putting countermeasures, such as security audits, in place. Google hacking vulnerability should be included in these security audits."
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Hacking Your Prius
CNet (05/22/06) Terdiman, Daniel

Toyota Prius owners are increasingly finding ways to hack into their vehicles' systems to alter factory specifications in an attempt to get more miles per gallon. "In the 1950s, it was all about getting more speed. Now, instead of getting more horsepower, it's about getting more miles per gallon," said Phillip Torrone of Make Magazine. Rising gas prices and concerns over an emerging energy crisis have exacerbated the tendency of hybrid-car owners to override factory-set features. Hackers have been able to modify the car so that it runs mostly on battery power, raising the car's fuel efficiency to nearly 100 miles per gallon. Prius owners have also executed hacks to alter other features, such as the beeping noise that some late model cars make when put into reverse. Early Prius adopters have formed a closely knit community to share information about methods for hacking the car's systems, and as a class are likely to have the expertise to execute such hacks, according to Dave Watson, president of Coastal Electronics, a company that promotes Prius modification kits. Toyota acknowledges that some owners will take steps to modify their cars, though it does not condone the behavior, particularly the hack that enables users to operate the GPS navigation system while the car is in motion. Watson counters that Toyota made an arbitrary distinction when it decided which features users could and could not operate while driving the car due to safety concerns. The feature that enables the Prius to run almost entirely on battery power at low speeds is available on models sold in Europe and Asia, but Toyota claims that the U.S. regulation requiring it to offer an eight-year warranty for its power system prevents it from including the option in models sold in the United States.
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Champion of Cyberspace Faces Its Biggest Case Yet
San Francisco Chronicle (05/23/06) P. A1; Egelko, Bob

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will face what could be the most significant case of its 16-year history when a federal judge hears dismissal motions from both AT&T and the Bush administration in a suit alleging that AT&T broke the law by handing over tens of millions of communications records to the NSA. The EFF has been alternatively praised as a champion of the common man and condemned as the enemy of the free market. "Their first instinct is to mistrust corporations, organizations competing in the market, to not have faith that competition will solve problems," said Patrick Ross of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. The EFF counters that it is in favor of the free market, but it warns against the alignment of government, private industry, and technology. "In different moments, each of these are friends of civil liberties," said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society and an EFF supporter. "Sometimes they conspire in some combination of the three to be a challenge to civil liberties." The EFF has struggled to convince the courts that it is attempting to safeguard essential freedoms, such as the right to have a private conversation. The group was outmaneuvered by the entertainment industry last June when it failed to frame the argument over downloading music around stifling innovation, as opposed to stealing intellectual property. The foundation has vigorously campaigned against the stipulations of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including the rule barring users from bypassing piracy protections, though the law has generally help up in the courts.
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Quiet Slowdown in Computer Revolution
Fairfax New Zealand (05/24/06) Cleary, John

The speed aspect of Moore's law no longer appears to apply, with researchers at Intel discovering that they were unable to make faster chips at the end of 2004, writes Waikato University computer science professor John Cleary. Meanwhile, he says other major chip manufacturers shut down projects or stopped making announcements regarding increases in speed. In 1965, computer engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the clock speed of semiconductors would double about every two years through 1975, but his prediction held up for 40 years. Moore also predicted that the number of transistors would double and prices would continue to fall, and those factors still apply. The presence of more transistors on chips will make some things go faster because they will be able to handle different tasks at the same time. This will mean that the speed and quality of applications such as games will continue to improve. Currently, the fastest chips stop short of 4 GHz, and there is no indication that chip makers will be able to produce anything that can top that speed. Computer scientists will now need to focus on getting chips to do more things at the same time, Cleary writes.
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The Fight Against V1@gra (and Other Spam)
New York Times (05/21/06) P. 3-1; Zeller Jr., Tom

As email filtering technologies have become more sophisticated, bulk emailers have begun sending larger, image-based messages in an attempt to slip past antispam filters. While end users are no longer inundated with the same volume of unwanted email that they faced just a few years ago, spam is still a major problem for network operators. Inbox filters nearly eliminate the amount of bulk messages that users receive, though spam still accounts for around 70 percent of all Internet traffic, in spite of the numerous regulatory initiatives enacted throughout the world designed to combat the problem. Between one-half and three-quarters of all spam is produced by zombie computers. Spammers who work out of countries with lax law enforcement such as Nigeria or Russia have little incentive to cease their operations, particularly when they can turn handsome profits by eliciting responses from less than 1 percent of the up to 200 million messages that they send out daily. Antispam groups have developed technologies to determine whether the borders of images in spam email have been generated randomly, a tactic that bulk emailers have recently adopted to evade filtering tools. "There are loads of different kinds of obfuscation," said MessageLabs senior antispam technologist Nick Johnson. "They've realized that people are looking for V1agra spelled with a '1' and st0ck with a 'zero' and that sort of thing, so they might try some sort of meaning obfuscation," he added, such as "referring to a watch as a 'wrist accessory'" rather than a 'Rolex.' Johnson also described a particularly impressive spam trick in which spammers used incorrect spelling and HTML code in such a way as to evade detection by software programs but appearing correctly to viewers. MessageLabs' Matt Sergeant says the company has also developed a database of "scam DNA" which uses pattern analysis to find spam that uses language common enough to avoid detection otherwise.
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Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System
Cornell University (05/06) Ramasubramanian, Venugopalan; Sirer, Emin Gun

The complexity of the domain name system (DNS) is such that a vulnerability in a little-known nameserver can have serious ramifications while trust relationships are hard to particularize and weave together, write Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gun Sirer with Cornell University's Department of Computer Science. A reliance on transitive trust engenders a situation where trust relationships can change without even the most assiduous name owners realizing it. The authors' survey of the trusted computing base in DNS reveals its great extent and potential inclusion of over 400 nodes; an average name relies on 46 nameservers, while the average in certain top-level domains tops 200. One third of domain names can be hijacked with publicly-known exploits through DNS, enabling hackers to wreak mischief. The survey also finds that 10 percent of the namespace is controlled by some 125 servers, one-fifth of which are run by educational institutions that may lack sufficient inducements and resources to practice integrity enforcement. Name security on the Internet can be fortified by the implementation of DNSSEC, although the authors caution that this solution still depends on the same physical delegations as DNS during lookups. DNSSEC must be more widely adopted in order to be truly effective, and even the support of DNSSEC by all nameservers cannot eliminate the disruption of name resolution by denial of service attacks on Web services. Ramasubramanian and Sirer reason that network administrators must have more familiarity with DNS vulnerabilities and exercise greater diligence over their trust relationships.
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Will Your Vote Count in 2006?
Newsweek (05/29/06) Vol. 147, No. 22, P. 14; Levy, Steven

With experts calling the recently reported vulnerabilities in e-voting machines the most serious ever discovered, Americans' confidence in the integrity of the election process is in jeopardy, writes Steven Levy. Diebold claims that the flaw uncovered last month by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti was designed to enable the machines to easily receive software upgrades, though that feature also invites the possibility that anyone with an elementary familiarity with the machines could install malicious code in a matter of minutes. Hackers could program the machines to fail on Election Day or, worse still, manipulate the ballot-counting functions to switch votes from one candidate to another. That type of software is capable of disguising itself so that even authorized technicians would be unable to detect its presence. "If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Concerns over the security of e-voting machines have sparked calls for including a mechanism to produce paper receipts in the event that a manual recount is necessary. "When you're using a paperless voting system, there is no security," said David Dill, a professor at Stanford University. Twenty-six states have already moved to implement a paper-recording mechanism, though a legislative initiative that would bar paperless voting throughout the country is stalled on the House floor. Six years after the disastrous election of 2000, U.S. voters will head to the polls this year still uncertain if their votes will be accurately recorded, Levy gloomily concludes. For information about ACM's e-voting activites, including a recent report on Statewide Databases of Registered Voters, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm.
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Certified Reputation--How an Agent Can Trust a Stranger
University of Southampton (ECS) (05/16/06) Huynh, Trung Dong; Jennings, Nicholas R.; Shadbolt, Nigel R.

Current approaches to building computational trust models, interaction trust and witness reputation, are limited, and the authors propose Certified Reputation (CR) as a trust model that circumvents these shortcomings by addressing agents' lack of direct experience and the difficulty in finding witness reports. Through CR, agents can dynamically supply third-party references about their earlier performance in order to build up trust among prospective interaction partners. This allows the rapid establishment of trust relationships while keeping costs to the involved participants low. Certified reputation of a target agent involves a number of certified references on how that agent behaves on specific tasks supplied by third-party agents (ratings), which are collected and retained by the target agent itself and made available to any other agent desiring to assess its level of trust for future interactions; through these ratings, the targeted agent can demonstrate its performance as judged by previous interaction partners in order to earn potential partners' trust. The authors acknowledge that the CR data will likely exaggerate an agent's projected behavior because a rational agent, being able to select which ratings to present, will only advertise its best ratings. Still, CR spares agents various expenditures associated with tracking down witness reports in terms of resources, time, and communication, and enables agents to assess trust for themselves, removing the need for a centralized service; this establishes compatibility between CR and open multi-agent environments. The authors' evaluation of CR shows that the model can help agents choose better interaction partners faster than with other computational trust models. Their future plans include developing a technique to automatically adapt the accuracy tolerance threshold while the system is running via the analysis of recorded performance levels of service providers with whom an agent has interacted to ascertain the probable inconstancy of honest ratings.
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Women in IT Speak Out
MC Press Online (05/06) Ordonez, Sandy

In interviewing two women about their IT careers, Sandy Ordonez found that while their jobs and experiences varied greatly, they had similar insights into the opportunities and obstacles facing women in IT. Kristen Daebler, a programmer for Quadrant Software, knew that she wanted to study science and math from an early age, and decided on programming in high school. "I always grew up thinking I was unusual for a woman because I was more logical and less creative. My major in college was computer science and my minor was math, and that was unusual for a woman," she said. While Daebler never faced overt discrimination in the workplace, she allows for the difficulty that woman can face when trying to climb the corporate ladder, given the time demands of working in IT that can interfere with family life. Daebler also admits that she refused to give up the time with her kids that would have been necessary to advance her career. She advises career-minded women in IT to put off having children, unless they are willing to spend a lot of time apart from them. Maria DeGiglio, currently employed as a consultant for Experture, has worked as a trainer, an analyst, an author, and a project manager throughout her more than two decades in IT. DeGiglio took her bachelor's degree in anthropology, and only came to IT after working for a New York accounting firm in the 1980s. DeGiglio says that she never suffered discrimination for being a woman, and that her liberal arts background did not stand in her way. "When the momentum started with the PC revolution, [it attracted] a lot of people from various walks of life, and those that weren't 'scientifically trained' brought to it a great deal of imagination that revolutionized the whole movement." While Daebler and DeGiglio both say that being female did not hold them back, the field of IT continues to struggle attracting and retaining women. To learn about ACM's Committee on Women and Computing, visit http://women.acm.org.
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Creating and Operating National-Scale Cyberinfrastructure Services
CTWatch Quarterly (05/06) Vol. 2, No. 2,Catlett, Charlie; Beckman, Pete; Skow, Dane

The authors use the TeraGrid project as an example of the costs and functions associated with the provision of a national cyberinfrastructure, with a focus on the software infrastructure and policies that are necessary to combine a variety of elements into a reliable and persistent national-scale facility. A grid facility's software components include science applications, middleware, infrastructure support services, and the tools for configuring community-developed systems or "Science Gateways," which most often take the form of Web portals. "We have partnered in the TeraGrid project not only with gateway providers but also with other grid facilities to identify and standardize a set of services and interaction methods that will enable Web portals and applications to invoke computation, information management, visualization, and other services," state the authors. A national-scale grid facility taps software infrastructure that supplies a set of common services, an architecture that enables unique facility exploitation, and the infrastructure required to coordinate the user-supportive efforts of resource providers. A successful grid facility involves close collaboration and cooperation between all participating organizations, and the identification of specific common service coordination and provision responsibilities, which in most grid projects is a function executed by a system integration team. A general-purpose grid facility must adjust to its user community's changing ideas and requirements, and the optimal model for user support is one that fully harnesses all available human links to users and their problem domains, most frequently by having the user support personnel local to the resource providers. Each of the facility's resource providers will supply documentation and training for locally provided resources and services, and proactively integrating these materials requires a communication framework that offers structure and common interfaces and formats for the materials, as well as the curation of the general systems. A national grid facility must use an operational infrastructure as its platform, while collaboration systems and processes that support virtual and distributed teams must be carefully attended to.
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While You Were Reading This, Someone Ripped You Off
Wired (05/06) Vol. 14, No. 5, P. 166; Newitz, Annalee

Hackers are exploiting increasingly pervasive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to beat security measures and steal or vandalize valuable information as well as physical items. The information carried on most commercial, passive-emitting RFID chips is rarely encrypted because it is so expensive, and this increases the danger that these chips can be cloned or that the data they hold can be corrupted. Although writable areas of RFID chips can be locked, many organizations fail to do so because they are unfamiliar with the equipment's operation or because the data fields must be regularly updated; using unlocked tags is often a more convenient option. Examples of RFID hacking include the recording of data on RFID-based price tags, which hackers can then upload to tags of other items, and the disabling of car antitheft devices through the use of a cloner to capture an encrypted RFID signal and a computer to crack it. "The world of RFID is like the Internet in its early stages," explains RSA Labs research manager Ari Juels. "Nobody thought about building security features into the Internet in advance, and now we're paying for it in viruses and other attacks. We're likely to see the same thing with RFIDs." Next-generation, RFID-equipped digital passports will reportedly have unbreakable encryption, but Juels thinks a brute-force attack could compromise the data since the encryption keys rely on passport numbers and birthdates that are structured and guessable.
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