Abstract:

Passports, identity cards and travel visas are examples of machine readable travel documents (MRTDs) or eMRTDs for their electronic variants. The security of the data exchanged between these documents and a reader is secured with a standardized password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol known as PACE. A new world-wide protocol migration is expected with the arrival of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards. In this paper, we focus on the impact of this migration on constrained embedded devices as used in eMRTDs. We present a feasibility study of a candidate post-quantum secure PAKE scheme as the replacement for PACE on existing widely deployed resource-constrained chips. In a wider context, we study the size, performance and security impact of adding post-quantum cryptography with a focus on chip storage and certificate chains for existing eMRTDs. We show that if the required post-quantum certificates for the eMRTD fit in memory, the migration of existing eMRTD protocols to their post-quantum secure equivalent is already feasible but a performance penalty has to be paid. When using a resource constrained SmartMX3 P71D600 smart card, designed with classical cryptography in mind, then execution times of a post-quantum secure PAKE algorithm using the recommended post-quantum parameter of the new PQC standard ML-KEM can be done in under a second. This migration will be aided by future inclusion of dedicated hardware accelerators and increased memory to allow storage of larger keys and improve performance.

Citation: Alnahawi, Nouri, Melissa Azouaoui, Joppe W. Bos, Gareth T. Davies, SeoJeong Moon, Christine van Vredendaal, and Alexander Wiesmaier. "Post-Quantum Cryptography in eMRTDs: Evaluating PAKE and PKI for Travel Documents." Cryptology ePrint Archive (2025).

Link to paper on eprint.

Link to conference website.