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NWA Pass Creator Boarded By FBI
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-10-30
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Indiana University PhD student Chris Soghoian had an eventful week following the debut of his online Northwest Airlines boarding pass creator, but pointing out a flaw in the Transportation Security Administration's security process brought him some unwanted attention.
 | | "Job or Jail?" |  |
The debut of Soghoian's experiment online brought calls for his arrest by House Homeland Security Committee member Ed Markey (D-MA). Markey later recanted his statement and instead called for the Department of Homeland Security to put him to work fixing loopholes like the one he discovered.
Although the online boarding pass creator has been shut down, Soghoian's description of the loophole can still be viewed. This is not some zero day exploit, either. Slate writer Andy Bowers described the potential for this abuse in February 2005; Soghoian credited Bowers for this.
Blogger Michael Hampton posted an account of the latest chapter in Soghoian's opus, with the FBI playing a prominent role. After a chat with the FBI, Soghoian spent the night away from home. When he returned, he found the FBI had dropped by again:
Then the FBI agents kept a federal judge awake until two in the morning to get a search warrant (mirror) because Soghoian, in creating the site, supposedly engaged in "conspiracy to commit, or the commission of knowingly presenting a false and fictitious claim upon or against the United States, or any department or agency thereof," according to the warrant.
Soghoian said he was shaken after the first FBI visit and spent the night elsewhere, and came home Saturday morning to find his door forced open, "a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers - and various other important things."
The steps Soghoian illustrated in his blog post on the technique, and again have been known for nearly two years, should be motivation enough for TSA to review its procedures. It could lead to a ban on online boarding pass printouts, which despite their convenience have been demonstrated as trivially easy to abuse.
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Tags: Chris Soghoian, Northwest Airlines, Boarding Pass
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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