Authentication enhancement techniques for BAC in 2G E-passport

Abstract

Electronic passport is one of the hottest research fields nowadays due to reported different attacks against various countries. Several attacks such as brute force attack, guessing machine readable zone's information are performed on Basic Access Control Protocol (BAC) due to its low entropy. This paper presents two proposed authentication enhancement techniques for seed key of BAC. The first proposed enhancement technique depends on a password provided by the citizen as input to the inspection system at the border during the verification process. The second proposed enhancement technique depends on extracting minutiae features from a scanned citizen's fingerprint to increase strength of seed key. Performance evaluation experiments for proposed enhancement techniques are conducted using MATLAB proving that the proposed techniques enhance authentication procedures of BAC and increase entropy of seed key with minimum additional delay. A facial recognition database and fingerprint recognition database are tested proving the strength of proposed techniques against cracking.