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wzMRTD

A free Electronic Passport software library

About

What's this ?

wzMRTD is a software library that reads electronic passports (also well known as E-Passports or biometric passports).

Electronic passports embedd a contactless smart card, which stores the data to be read by border-clearance software or by wzMRTD. The mapping of the chip (file system, data layout) has been defined by ICAO, an international organization, in Machine Readable Travel Document (MRTD) standard.

Communication between wzMRTD and the chip is perfomed through a contactless reader compliant with ISO/IEC 14443 standard. PC/SC and Pro-Active readers are supported. Accessing the data is possible only in a secure session, where the authentication key is computed from information printed on the passport (number, date of delivery and date of expiracy). The digits -printed on the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ)- can be read by an OCR scanner.

wzMRTD is an open-source project, and aims to be modified, enhanced, re-used... by anybody interested in this subject.

Why ?

I decided to develop wzMRTD and to publish its source code in a reaction of mood vis-a-vis many articles publied in late 2006, dealing with the "vulnerability" of electronic passports. The most significant one is this article (title : "Cracked it !") published by the Guardian in UK. Here's an extract :

(...) we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

To make a long story short, wzMRTD is an answer to this misinformation.

In my opinion, nobody shall be surprised to be able to read a passport with a proximity card reader and a small piece of software, this is precisely the intended goal (remember what "MRTD" stands for...). Relax, guys, you've not "cracked" anything, you've just read a document, and implemented what was described in it. No surprise at all, unless you forgot to read the more interesting pages...

This article in question caused a small thread on french Usenet group fr.misc.cryptologie, where interesting contributions (especially signed by Sylvain) may be read (in french).

Due to my position at Pro-Active, I had a few contactless readers, and a few contactless passports, so I decided to "crack" them as well, and to publish the project for people interested in the subject.

And afterwards ?

Obviously wzMRTD is not really interesting for end-user, one needs a small graphical interface to display the data and the picture, that's why wzPASS has been written too.

Todo list / Roadmap

Credits / Thanks