Electronic Passports in a Nutshell

This document tries to give concise, (semi)formal specifications for the second generation electronic passports as used by most EU countries, and for the closely related ISO18013 standard for electronic driving licenses. We developed these specifications as a follow-up to making open source Java Card implementations of these standards. Our aim is to provide useful information – implicit in the official specification, but crucial for the overall security – in a simple format that could be useful to anyone implementing these standards, performing security tests, or doing code reviews. More generally, we want to explore useful formats for rigorously specifying the typical complex combinations of security protocols that arise in real applications. In particular, we provide state diagrams which describe the state that are largely implicit in the official specifications, but which have to be explicit in any implementation, and which also provide a basis for systematic modelbased testing.