An on-line secure e-passport protocol

The first generation e-passport standard is proven to be insecure and prone to various attacks. To strengthen, the European Union (EU) has proposed an Extended Access Control (EAC) mechanism for e-passports that intends to provide better security in protecting biometric information of the e-passport bearer. But, our analysis shows, the EU proposal fails to address many security and privacy issues that are paramount in implementing a strong security mechanism. In this paper we propose an on-line authentication mechanism for electronic passports that addresses the weakness in existing implementations, of both The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and EU. Our proposal utilises ICAO PKI implementation, thus requiring very little modifications to the existing infrastructure which is already well established.