Discovering ePassport Vulnerabilities using Bisimilarity

02/18/2020

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by   Ross Horne, et al.

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We uncover privacy vulnerabilities in the ICAO 9303 standard implemented by ePassports worldwide. These vulnerabilities, confirmed by ICAO, enable an ePassport holder who recently passed through a checkpoint to be reidentified without openning their ePassport. This paper explains how bisimilarity was used to discover these vulnerabilities. In order to tackle such bisimilarity problems, we develop here a chain of methods for the applied pi-calculus including a symbolic under approximation of bisimilarity, called open bisimilarity, and a modal logic, called classical FM, for describing and certifying attacks. Evidence is provided to argue for a new scheme for specifying such unlinkability problems that more accurately reflects the capabilities of an attacker.