A letter sent by two US senators to the country's Customs and Border Protection authority reveals that though the US insists on e-Passports being used by visitors from countries which have a visa waiver arrangement with the US, the smart chips on these passports have not been checked since 2007 because the CBP lacks the technical capability to do so.
Australia is one of the countries that has a visa-waiver arrangement with the US.
Ron Wyden and Claire McCaskill said in their letter to Kevin McAleenan, the acting commissioner of the authority, that the CBP should act right away to use the anti-forgery and anti-tamper features in e-Passports which had not been used by the agency since they were implemented in 2007.
The two senators pointed out that the high-tech passports had smart chips which stored traveller information and cryptographic signatures to prove the legitimacy and validity of the document.
"For more than a decade, the US has required that countries on the visa-waiver list issue machine-readable e-Passports," they wrote. "Since 2015, the US has further required that all visitors from countries on the visa-waiver list enter the US with an e-Passport. Despite these efforts, CBP lacks the technical capabilities to verify e-Passport chips."
{loadposition sam08}Wyden and McCaskill said though the CBP had deployed e-Passport readers at many entry points, and downloaded data from the smart chips in these passports, the agency did not have the software needed to authenticate the information stored on the chips.
"Specifically, CBP cannot verify the digital signatures stored on the e-Passport which means CBP is unable to determine if the data stored on the smart chips has been tampered with or forged," they wrote.
The two US senators claimed that CBP had been aware of this security lapse since at least 2010 and eight years later it still did not have the technological ability to authenticate the machine-readable data.
They asked the CBP to take steps to properly authenticate e-Passports by January 2019.