The motivation of myIDP is to reduce the amount of redundant data that we have to enter in various sites, especially related ot e-government, which is error-prone and leads to many validation problems. In the SuisseID, the idea is to add another claim assertion service. With myIDP, users can save data entered on e-forms that have been accepted by a service provider, for reuse in other circumstances. The idea behind it is that information that has already been accepted somewhere is more likely to be correct. Interestingly, the user has access to the recorded attributes, and can decide to remove some that she doesn’t want to be recorded.

MyIDP can function as an attribute provider or as a claim proxy . As an attribute provider, a service provider requests an attribute, MyIDP then asks the user to confirm the use of a recorded attribute, and signs it before to return it. As a claim proxy, the service provider request comes with a claim list request. MyIDP then returns the signed attribute together with a claim list URI, from which the service provider can download information about where the information has previously been accepted as valid, and use this information to decide how trustworthy the attribute is.

This project sounds really good, because once again, we are movng from hard identity to soft identity, where data is not 100% trusted but nevertheless more trusted than data entered manually. And of course, this model is very nice because, the more it is used, the more trustworthy it gets. The quality of attributes grows as they are getting used, and this is an important property.

Internet banking has now taken over as the main interface with banks, with of course a shift to mobile devices in the recent years. In the end, banking is adapting quite fast to technology, because customers expect them to move fast (if they don’t, customers can switch).

So, the banking ecosystem has adapted to integrate new technologies, and they do that fast. Of course, at least according to Vasco, the problem is fraud, and the solution is authentication. Vasco’s answer includes platgorm evaluation (jailbroken or not?), user evaluation (2-factor authentication), transaction evaluation (2-factor authentication again) and finally validation.

The next idea is to use NFC to improve 2-factor authentication, for instance to provision keys, to perform WYSIWYS checks. On the opposite, 2-factor authentication can benefit to NFC, by providing flexible authentication.

That all sounds interesting, but I will need a bit more technical information to undrstand what they are saying. In particular, I am always careful with solutions in which one of the 2 factors needed for authentication isnthe device on which I want to do something. This may not be very rational, bit I am not feeling good about it.

Of course, this presentation was a lot about advertising, and yiu can better understand where Vasco is going to by getting to MyDigipass. This offer sounds interesting for securing online accounts. Maybe that I will consider giving it a try.

To celebrate that, I have decide to attend the opening session this year. We started by an enthusiastic eID spporter from European Union, promising us all regulations and standards ready for 2014, which sounds interesting. After all, there are very interesting deployment in countries like Belgium and Estonia, which could be extended.

Then, we get a panel, with the question below. Speakers are Christian van der Valk, from TrustWeaver, Herrmann Sterzinger, from G&D, Massimo Cappelli, from Global CyberSecurity Center, and Marie Figarella, from Gemalto.

Why has eIAS services not been a success to date?

• Is it really the case? There haven’t been failures, there are many services ready to,use, and a lack of recognition, with a common perception that digital signature ismore difficult than it actually is.
• Citizen certificates are too expensive, and the use cases are not compelling enough. Thisis changing in some places, like in Austria, where the state pays the citizen certificate.
• Market fragmentation and lack of trust and confidence are the two main issues. They may even be linked because the fragmentation does not allow the development of global solutlons, deployed across Europe.
• Issues have been legal and societal, not technical. Fragmentation and lacking use case are the most important,

How would the new electronic identification and trust services regulation improve on this situation?

• Moving from directive to regulation is important
• Making it global would be good, but also hittin some limits, in particular regarding discrepancies in privacy requirements.
• Moving to a regulation will limit fragmentation, the scope will be larger, going beyond signatures to seals, timestamps, and more. Mobility between states will also be greatly improved. Finally, supervision should be improved.

What additional key actions would be necessary to make eIAS a success?

• Sharing identity and authentication between public and private spheres would help. Also,aligning with the global market with help, including private support, like Adobe. Also, the recognition of non-PKI solutions would be required (that sounds interesting)
• Moving beyond web authentication is required. Moving to global regulation loses things, such as already deployed eIDs, which do not comply to the new regulation, and also existing standads and existing profiles.
• Bureaucratic simplification associated to eIAS would be great help. We are also missing a common framework of expertise, with collaboration between national agencies. Thereisalso a digital and cultural divide, which hurts wide adoption. Finally, including soft identity would increase the use of strong identity, if it can be used in our everyday life.
• Associate reliable digital identity with a portable secure elemnt, to allow 2-factor authentication. Build an open and interoperale secure Internet. Privacy by design. Push digital identity on all SIM cards to benefit from NFC

Now, that’s quite interesting. The views from the panelists are quite consistent. The question that puzzles me most is the relationship between national and private identity. I am left wondering what opportunities will be given to private companies and web providers to leverage this eID. Making this happen would be a great boost to eIAS.

I also liked Gemalto’s analysis and proposals, which was short and to the point, except the last point, of course; mandating SIM-based identity for NFC is ludicrous and pure lobbying, at least because the SIM is not the only way to access NFC.

So, an interesting first panel, although there haven’t been many suprises and illuminating discussions.

• If fingerprints are used, use fake fingers, in particular at automated checkpoints (which do not exist yet, but could come in the near future).
• If pictures are used, exploit the fact that humans are imperfect. Choose a person with similar face, add/remove beard/hair, and get through customs.

Interestingly enough, these two attacks are based on the fact that customs officers will trust the technology, and that they will be more relaxed if they rely on “secure passsports”.

There remains one major difficulty. Skimming is easy, so you can spy on an exchange at customs. However, decrypting the information isn’t as simple. The encryption key is based on public information (birth date, passport number, passport expiry date), but this information is only available in the passport itself. The authors propose several schemes to get this information, in particular schemes from anybody who has access to the passport during its production and delivery (including post office staff). Even in the case of post office employees, they know the name (on the envelope, which can lead to an estimate of the birth date) and the expiration date (roughly 10 years from now). All they miss is the passport number, which is not completely random. However, they are not sure that the picture/fingerprint of the person matches the one of the person for which a passport must be made.

There is another possibility of attack, which would work with people entering the United States on visa waivers (i.e., those who are required to carry an electronic passport). It is based on two important facts about the handling of passports:

• All US visitors on visa waivers have to fill out an I-94W form every time they enter the country. The problem is that this form is very confusing, so many people have to fill out several before to succeed. US customs lines are often littered with I-94W, which include the birth date and passport numbers of people who are currently going through customs (and getting their passport data read).
• It is of course possible to record the exchange between the passport and the reader and decipher it in the comfort of your home.

So, here is a plan for getting all the information you need for making a fake passport for a friend, for instance if pictures are used as biometrics:

1. Get in a tourist flight from a country where your look is very common.
2. If you are lucky, sit close to a person that looks like your friend. This person will fill out the I-94W during the flight. Just look at what they write (birth date and passport number).
3. If you are less lucky, get out of the flight as fast as you can, and look at people discarding I-94W forms on tables. Locate one that looks like your friend, and pick up the leftover form, or note the birth date and passport number.
4. Stay close to your victim in the line. When they pass through customs, record the exchange between their passport and the reader.
5. Back at home, try all possible expiration dates (3650 in theory, much less if you exclude week-ends, around 250 if you consider that e-passports have onyl been in use for less than a year.

This all looks very, very easy. Even a bit too much to make me comfortable. Note that there are quite a few variants, depending on the passport scheme used and on the risks that you are ready to take:

• If fingerprints are used, things are even easier. Just pick up any I-94W form (which is littered with fingerprints from the right person) and follow that person through customs.
• Even simpler and less risky, think at places where people show passports. It is quite common at hotels, so the accomplice could work as hotel staff, and wait patiently for a person who looks like your friend. Then, find a way to scan their passport (you may need good OCR software, since you cannot use a cusoms reader).

There are probably many other ways to fool the system. But there also are a few countermeasures, against this attack and others:

• For individuals: consider your passport number and expiration date confidential. Never use your passport for anything else than customs; carry another fomr of id. Never discard documents with these numbers on them, especially if associated to your name.
• For customs: consider the I-94W and other forms sensitive. Avoid piles of discarded documents on writing tables. Make sure that they are discarded neatly. Avoid other personal information than the name on the forms (all other information available on the passport could be printed by the customs officer).

Such countermeasures are simple to implement for countries, but maybe not for individuals. I remember when I was much younger, how difficult it was to enter a bar in the US by showing a French Id. People would look suspiciously at it, because it is not written in english and it does not look like a US driving license. This must of course be much worse for people from another origin (japanese, arabic, or any country that does not use the roman alphabet). In that case, showing your passport is often the only solution. Too bad.

EDITED (22/11): Replaced name by birth date in MRZ data.

One of them is related to the “victim identification” threat that interests me. Since the key used in the chip can be read from the passport, it can be read by anybody who has access to your passport. This opens the way to victim identification targeted toward a single person. The attack simply consists in listening to the authentication protocol and verifying that the victim’s MRZ data is actually used. If it does, you have then identified the victim.

The requirement to read the data seems difficult. However, there are many situations in which one may need to show a passport, including the following examples:

• In Europe, it is common to ask for a passport in hotels.
• In the US, some identification is often required when paying with a credit card, or when ordering a beer (if you happen to be young enough). When you are a foreigner, most clerks will look at your foreign ID’s with great suspicion, and in some cases, your passport may be your only “Photo ID.” As a conclusion, you end up showing your passport ten times a day.
• Many companies and administrations require you to show some identification to enter their premises. As a foreigner, you foten are required to show a passport. And no, I don’t believe that security guards should be trusted more than bartenders.

And of course, an attacker may have other ways to access your passport, for instance by infiltrating an insider.

As a final note, this attack is a difficult issue, since it is quite difficult to avoid without a shared secret, and shared secrets are not a realistic option for electronic passports.

Of course, this is smart card technology, and it seems that, in many cases, Java Card is present behind the scenes. I would like to react on two main topics:

• Possible attacks on RFID passports. In particular, passport cloning, and how to identify someone’s nationality.
• How to disable your own passport. Some people seem interested in destroying the RFID chip on their passports, and this may be possible without using a microwave.

Cloning a passport is quite easy, because this is not a threat that the electronic passport defends against. Even if your passport includes access control (you must be authenticated before to read the data from the chip), the data from which the key is derived in printed on the passport. The idea is here to avoid skimming, not cloning. Therefore, in all cases, the data is readily available, and the cloning process is easy:

• Get the ICAO spec. The specs are all freely available. The interesting one is the description of the Logical Data Structure.
• Using a contactless smart card reader, read the data using standard ISO7816 commands. If access control is required, you will need to compute the key.
• Write a Java Card application that implements the ICAO spec (that is the painful part, but you may be able to find chips that implement that spec).
• Load the application on a card, and personalize it with the data you got from the other card.

Of course, this does not solve much of the problem. A cloned passport, in particular if it includes biometric data, still does not allow you to get through customs. Actually, this may already be a benefit, since it is more difficult to imitate somebody’s fingerprint than to simply look similar (since the picture is the only authentication means in classical passports).

About identifying someone’s nationality by skimming (without opening the passport), there are several possible leads:

• If the passport does not support the access control option, then there is no problem: simply read the “Issuing state” field.
• If the passport supports access control, then authentication is required before to start reading data. There are many attacks available, but they require a complicated setup, so we won’t consider them here.
• Another interesting lead is the initialization of the communication between the chip and the reader. The chip returns a string of bytes (ATS, Answer To Select), which contains protocol information and “historical bytes”. These bytes should be ignored by readers, but they usually contain product version information and other interesting things. Depending on these bytes, it may be possible to identify a provider, or even an issuing country. I have not tried it on a passport, but these bytes are usually quite interesting.
• The final lead comes from the fact that there are many options in the specification. It may be possible to use this information to identify citizens of a country. A typical way to do so is to try all optional commands. This is often possible even if access control is required: the status word will be different for an unsupported command and for an “access denied” command. The same trick may allow users to identify the data layout, by examining the answers to the SELECT command.

Such attacks are trivial, and they are cheap to design and implement. Anybody with the slghtest smart cad knowledge is able to design them, provided that they have access to a few passports to test them. So identifying the nationality of a passport holder does not look that difficult.

The main issue is here that skimming is a new issue for smart card people, and that our current basic specifications are not designed to resist to that attack. This does not mean that we can’t deend against it, but just that we need to consider it in our security requirements.