Basic Access Control - Security

Security

There is a replay attack against the basic access control protocol that allows an individual passport to be traced. The attack is based on being able to distinguish a failed nonce check from a failed MAC check and works against passports with randomized unique identifiers and hard to guess keys.

The basic access control mechanism has been criticized as offering too little protection from unauthorized interception. Researchers claim that because there are only limited numbers of passport issued, many theoretically possible passport numbers will not be in use in practice. The limited range of human age ranges further reduce the space of possibilities.

In other words, the data used as an encryption key has a low entropy, meaning that guessing the session key is possible via a modest brute force attack.

This effect increases when passport numbers are issued sequentially or contain a redundant checksum. Both are proven to be the case in passports issued by the Netherlands. There are other factors that can be potentially used to speed up a brute force attack. There is the fact that dates of birth are typically not distributed randomly in populations. Dates of birth may be distributed even less randomly for the segments of a population that pass, for example, a check-in desk at an airport. And the fact that passports are often not issued on all days of the week and during all weeks of a year. Therefore not all theoretically possible expiration dates may get used. In addition, the fact that real existing dates are used further limits the number of possible combinations: The month makes up two of the digits used for generating the key. Usually, two digits would mean 100 (00-99) combinations in decimal code or (36*36=1296) combinations in alphanumeric code. But as there are only 12 months, there are only 12 combinations. It is the same with the day (two digits and 31 combinations).

The German passport serial-number format (previously 10-digit, all-numeric, sequentially assigned) was modified on 1 November 2007, in response to concerns about the low entropy of BAC session keys. The new 10-character serial number is alphanumeric and generated with the help of a specially-designed block cipher, to avoid a recognizable relationship with the expiry date and increase entropy. In addition, a public-key based extended access control mechanism is now used to protect any information in the RFID chip that goes beyond the minimum ICAO requirements, in particular fingerprint images.