Novay's NFC Passport Reader

At Novay, as part of a project for EIT ICT Labs on Mobile Security & Privacy, we have been working hard on an Android app, based on JMRTD, to demonstrate how passports (and identity cards) and the passport holder can be validated. The first version of our efforts is now available from the Play Store.

Now the underlying ePassport Java library JMRTD was ported to Android almost two years ago in a proof-of-concept app. The new Novay app focuses on two new features. First, it makes the passport reading experience as user friendly as possible. The UI is up to 4.x standards, and has been better thought out. We're looking at showing the information as soon as possible as it comes in over the (awfully slow) NFC connection, while at the same time making sure that the user understands that the document needs to held in proximity to the device for the couple of seconds that it takes to read all of the information.

Second, and more importantly, the new app uses the security mechanisms of the chip embedded in a passport to their full potential. This means that the authenticity of the contents and of the chip are actually checked, and the results are displayed to the user.

We're working on a next version this app in a second phase of this project. We still see plenty of possibilities to improve the usability. 

People at Novay involved are: Peter Ebben, Ruud Kosman, and myself. Thanks to Atlantic Zeiser for providing the sample document that was used in the screenshots above and in the Play Store.

JMRTD for Android

JMRTD, the Java library that I (together with others) maintain to access and interpret ePassport content, has been ported to Android by Max Günther. To demonstrate this, Max has developed an app (see the screenshot) for Nexus S (and other NFC Android handsets). We're not the first ePassport project on Android or NFC, but we try to be the most usable one!

The contactless technology in ePassports, ISO-14443, is fully compatible with NFC. Essentially this means that an NFC device in reader mode will be able to read ePassports. That is, of course, if the device has sufficient access privileges (i.e. Basic Access Control BAC, and Extended Access Control EAC). Max's app demonstrates how the essential passport holder details (aka datagroup 1) and the passport holder's facial image (aka datagroup 2) can be displayed.

The latter is actually non-trivial since that image is encoded in JPEG 2000 by some issuing countries, a format that is not supported in Android by default (thankfully there's jj2000). Another challenge that we encountered is the presence of a crippled version of Bouncy Castle in Android 2.3 which prevents inclusion of the full version (thankfully there's Spongy Castle). In general we've made many changes to JMRTD and SCUBA to make these libraries easier to port to other platforms.

We're working hard on making the app more robust and usable. Max and Claude Heyman are currently the main developers looking at Android NFC. We're trying to get MRZ OCR scanning to work (perhaps based on the Java OCR project). In its current form the app is not doing document validation or access to EAC protected data, but JMRTD allows this, in principle. We hope to publish the proof-of-concept app via the Android market soon. If you own a Nexus S (and an ePassport) we're definitely interested in your feedback.

Update: Max published the app on the market.

RSA Conference Europe 2009

I attended RSA Conference Europe 2009 in London the other week, where I gave a presentation on something I blogged about before (combining ePassports and Information Card, a project sponsored by NLnet). My talk was scheduled for the very last slot on the very last day, which means I had plenty of time to go and listen to the other talks. Some of my impressions are below.

I checked out the booths of the conference's sponsors and noticed a relative large number of authentication factor vendors (G&D, Kobil, smspasscode.com) and of course the big guys (RSA Security, Microsoft, Qualys, CA).

As for the presentations, there were at least 4 different tracks, and all talks had catchy titles. Very difficult to choose from. There were a lot of "securing the cloud" talks. I've heard people claim that 'cloud==deperimeterization'. Others claim that 'cloud==virtualization', and yet others claim that 'cloud==SaaS', and even 'cloud==social networks'. Most of the talks dealt with managing the risks of enterprise cloud computing (sharing resources is risky, you'll need good SLA contracts for that). I especially liked the Collateral Hacking panel session which focused on the risk presented by totally unrelated parties you happen to share services with.

There were a few hacking-presentations. I really enjoyed Björn Brolin and Marcus Murray's Breaking the Windows driver signing model. Great live reversing demo. Bottom line: Running an anti-virus suite with badly engineered (yet Microsoft signed) kernel drivers can actually render your PC less secure from malware.

Talking about anti-virus software vendors. Both McAfee's Anthony Bettini's and Kaspersky labs' Stefan Tanase's presentation focused on threats from social networks (personalized spam, Twitter based C&C, targeted attacks based on synchronization between personal and enterprise information). Anthony had the best sound-bites IMHO: 'open-sourcing one's life', 'keep your enemies closer'. Stefan showed a glimpse of crawler based technology that Kaspersky's R&D team in Romania is working on.

More targeted social network threats came from Brian Honan who introduced the audience to some of the tools of the trade, notable pipl.com and Maltego. Interestingly, in Ireland, anyone can request everyone else's birth certificate (apparently for reasons of genealogical research), and the only thing needed to request a driver's license or passport in Ireland is a birth certificate.

Microsoft's keynote was delivered by Amy Barzdukas. She made some valid points about the perception of privacy and security by the average computer user. The FUD (initially directed at Google: Chrome's auto-completing address bar will send packets to Google, OMG, better stick with IE8) was a little too much for my taste. They're going to make it more difficult to download and install third party software through IE because of the fake virus scanner scams.

The keynote by special agent Mularski of the FBI and Andy Auld of SOCA about the Russian Business Network was so secret that I cannot blog about it. The keynote by Dave Hansen of CA on content-aware extensions of RBAC was pretty interesting and included another secret agent.

Andrew Nash of PayPal gave an insightful presentation on the consumer identity bootstrap problem. After explained the clever big bang/steady state analogy he showed just how big the problem is. What's the most important feature an Identity Provider should offer to its users? Right. Anonymity. The other PayPal presentation was by Hadi Nahari who put forward some requirements (or rather, desirements) for identity in mobile computing. It appears that PayPal is trying to get some of these ideas into the Global Platform specifications.

Ira Winkler went on a one-hour rant over the use of the term information warfare. Funny stuff, except for the one Estonian guy in the audience.

Two ideas I could have submitted to the SIMagine contest

Here are two ideas I could have submitted to the SIMagine contest, but didn't. ;)

1. Info Cards securely stored in your SIM: Florian van Keulen, one of Maarten's students did a project on different architectures for implementing Info Card on mobile devices. One of the options that Florian investigated was to store the Info Cards on the SIM. A handset resident application would then facilitate communication between the Card Selector on a different platform (a PC in an Internet cafe) and the SIM through Bluetooth.
   
2. Turning an existing contactless smart card into a pre-paid mobile SIM application: You're not supposed to be able to clone an ePassport or contactless creditcard, of course. But you can do something else. You can pre-record some challenge-response pairs using an NFC handset and store these in an application on the secure element (SE, usually the SIM card) of the handset. If the application can authenticate itself to an inspection system (a POS terminal) then the handset can be used instead of the original contactless card. This improves convenience: one device instead of multiple cards, you now have a GUI. As for security: You can limit the number of challenge-response pairs, you can time-stamp the challenge-response pairs (the SE can connect to some trusted time server during enrollment), etc.
   

Oh well, deadline expired, never mind.

How to trust Country Signing Certificates

I've collected a number of country signing (public key) certificates of different ePassport issuing countries who have put their certificates online. Most of these were brought to my attention by Google's alert service.

The global ICAO PKI for signing ePassports is actually a forrest of many national PKIs. And each national PKI is only 2 levels deep (depending on where you start counting):

• CSCA: Country Signing Certificate Authority
• DSCA: Document Signing Certificate Authority
• AA: Active Authentication "certificate" (which really is not part of the PKI, as this is not a certificate but a raw public key, signed implicitly in the security document of the ePassport)
  

All of this becomes more complex now that we are moving towards Extended Access Control, but the fact remains that the lack of a central trusted CA makes it difficult to bootstrap trust. ICAO has proposed two alternatives:

• The central ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD)
  
• Country cross signing of CSCs

The first alternative is really an online facility which issues claims about (document) signers. The usual drawbacks apply: single point of failure, cost of maintaining infrastructure, etc. The second alternative involves having each country (or at least as many countries as possible) sign each other's certificates.

Is it possible to have a central CA instead? Some of the government Web sites where I (or rather, Google) found the CSCA certificates are protected using SSL, at least the Dutch site is (yes, I know, the certificate has expired, but I downloaded the CSCA certificate before the expiration date of the server certificate). I could have recorded the SSL transaction while downloading that CSCA certificate and I could have made that part of the CSCA certificate itself. Unfortunately, the commercial CA (in this case Verisign) which signed the server key doesn't make claims about the validity of certificate files hosted at protected servers. Sometimes the Web is just not semantic enough.

Update (July 2009): The certificate of bprbzk.nl was renewed.

The ePassport helps fight online identity fraud

This translation of an article in Dutch newspaper het Financiële Dagblad, 2 februari 2009, pp. 7 was created by Google translate (with only slight modifications by hand). The Dutch version also appears elsewhere on the interwebs.

A new tool in the fight against identity fraud has arrived. The Dutch ePassport with chip can be used as additional identification technology for Internet transactions. Without loss of privacy.

This is evident from NLnet Foundation funded research Martijn Oostdijk and Dirk-Jan van Dijk of the Telematica Institute have done. Using a simple card reader, the chip can be read on any PC. The standards to do this are public. The researchers developed software for an identity provider - a trusted party that creates digital identities and provides these to other parties - which they run on a server at the institute. Furthermore, the duo developed software that must be installed on the client's PC.

With passport in hand, the user may enter a web shop. The shop might need to know if the buyer is older than 18. The identity provider filters out only the information from the passport required for the purchase, and forwards that information to the shop. The buyer remains in charge of his own data and can terminate the transaction at any moment. The process is intended as additional evidence. Often, a user needs various account names and passwords to use various online services. But such credentials, also credit cards, etc. may fall into the wrong hands. Of course, a passport can also be stolen. "This is why the passport by itself should not be used as identification. But in combination with other authentication means it could stop simple forms of identity theft", said Michiel Leenaars, strategy director of Stichting NLnet. According to Martijn Oostdijk, the system is suitable for all forms of identification. "It's not just for online purchases. The system might play a role in safe surfing by children or patient access to electronic health records, etc."

Identity fraud is costing society billions of euros per year. In the U.S., the damage last year was 31 billion euro. At present, slightly less than half of all Dutch citizens have a passport or identity card with chip. In 2011, that will be the case for all citizens.

NLnet Foundation is committed to an open information society and supports projects that contribute financially. Software developed within the projects are published as "open source" and is freely available for parties who wish to further develop it. The Telematica Institute combines innovation power and knowledge of IT to achieve breakthroughs in how we live.