Nude Body Scanners Easily Tricked

They've been removed from U.S. airports, but are still being used elsewhere.

Researchers are delivering a paper at a security conference Thursday highlighting how easy it is to get weapons through the nude body scanners that have been removed from US airports but have been placed at other government installations across the globe.

The report, given at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego, highlights the insecurity of the Rapiscan Secure 1000 Single Pose "backscatter" scanner that once was used throughout the nation's airports but are now deployed at US prisons and courthouses, as well as airports in Africa. The paper, "Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner," from researchers at the University of California-San Diego, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University, confirms what even laymen researchers had already discovered: hiding weapons on the side of one's body defeats the machine (PDF).