Strengthening the security of machine-readable documents

Abstract

There is an on-going trend towards turning paper documents that store personal information or other valuable data into machine-readable form. An example of this trend is the electronic passport that will become common in the near future. In this paper we show how the security of these machine readable documents could be improved by combining RFID with optical memory devices. We propose integrating an optical memory device into the RFID enabled smart document and present methods how these two storage media can be combined to secure the document against threats like illicit scanning, eavesdropping and forgery. The presented approaches make use of the optical document-to-reader channel which is more secure than the radio-frequency communication interface. To demonstrate the potential of our approaches we show how they could overcomea number of existing security and privacy threats of electronic passports. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.