Simplify eMRTD data extraction with NFCPassportReader – a Swift package for reading and decoding electronic travel documents via NFC. Access personal details, biometrics, and security elements effortlessly.
This project is part of a research thesis about interactive experiences through NFC carried out by Andrea Deluca during master's degree in computer engineering at PoliTO in collaboration with Iriscube Reply.
NFCPassportReader allows you to read ISO/IEC 7816-4 smart cards following the ICAO Doc 9303 specifications. All the travel documents enabled to be read via NFC have an integrated circuit and the corresponding "Chip Inside" symbol is reported on them.
As ICAO Doc 9303 reports, an host of security mechanisms should be performed. At the moment, the NFCPassportReader package supports both BAC and PACE (just with general mapping) protocols to access the IC, Chip Authentication to authenticate the IC and Passive Authentication to authenticate data stored in the IC.
No automated tests have been implemented and the package has been tested on the italian eID (CIE). However, I would like to point out that CIE implements DESEDE2 and DH cryptography algorithms. The other variants have been implemented following the same rules as the previous ones but their correct functioning is not guaranteed.
Please, take note of the following:
- PACE is supported just with general mapping. PACE integrated mapping and PACE chip authentication mapping are not supported.
- Validation of the certification path from a Trust Anchor to the Document Signer Certificate used to sign the SOD during Passive Authentication is not supported.
- Active Authentication and Terminal Authentication are not supported.
See more about eMRTD data reading through NFC from the ICAO Doc 9303. See more about the package implementation from the source code and see also the documentation.
You can install NFCPassportReader via Swift Package Manager by adding
the following line to your Package.swift:
import PackageDescription
let package = Package(
[...]
dependencies: [
.package(url: "https://github.com/andrea-deluca/NFCPassportReader.git", from: "0.1.0"),
]
)Once you have installed the package, you can import it and calliing one of the readPassport(:) functions available in NFCPassportReader class is enaugh
to start an NFC read of the travel document.
You can pass the document number, the date of birth of the holder and the document date of expiry as String args and the package
will generate the correct MRZ key for you or you can pass directly the MRZ key. Your app will automatically show the NFC request to read
an enabled document. When reading ends, an NFCPassportModel will be returned from the called method and you will be able to read all the extracted info
and the security protcols results.
The extracted info are coded into some structs, such as TravelDocument and MRZ, FaceBiometricDataEncoding, PersonalDetails and DocumentDetails.
Some shortcuts are also defined, e.g. to read firstname or lastname without moving through TravelDocument or PersonalDetails models, and the facial image
is also exported as UIImage to show it easily.
See also Demo to discover a practical example.
Once you have installed the NFCPassportReader package, a documentation built with DocC is provided for public APIs.
See more about eMRTD data reading through NFC from the ICAO Doc 9303. See more about the package implementation from the source code and see also the internal documentation.
A full working demo is provided by NFCTouchpoint iOS application. It has been developed as part of the research to study some useful use cases on how NFC may be used within a mobile banking app smartly.
I'm curious to know if you appreciate the work done and I would be very happy to hear your opinions or answer your questions. For anything you can find me also on X and LinkedIn.
I would like to point out that the OpenSSL Swift Package developed by @krzyzanowskim has been used to carry out some more complex security operations.
In addition, I would like to mention the NFCPassportReader repo developed by @AndyQ. I studied it as well as the ICAO Doc 9303 to be able to develop the NFCPassportReader package.
Lastly, I would like to say that the ASN.1 module has been extracted and manipulated as needed from swift-asn1 developed by @apple.
The following are some notes of what should definitely be done:
- Implement automated tests also providing a functioning guarantee for all cryptographic possibilities that may be used by eMRTD
- Implement integrated mapping and chip authentication mapping for PACE access mechanism
- Implement full Passive Autentication
- Implement Active Authentication, also providing decoding of secured elements such as DG3, and Terminal Authentication, if needed
- Implement data decoding for missing data groups
- Implement
GET RESPONSEAPDU to try to handle extra bytes reading - Fully integrate swift-asn1 package developed by @apple