Master's Thesis
Prajwalan's MS thesis deals with security aspects in Electronic Passports. The main goal of upgrading passports to an electronic version is making it hard for criminals or anybody to counterfeit or illegally duplicate them. A practical way of doing so is with the use of digital signatures because it is computationally hard to counterfeit them. So all the contents of epassports are now digitally signed by the “Document Signer” of the issuing country. The e-passport has thus achieved its central objective however it suffers from several security and privacy issues. The thesis explores what these issues are and how different researchers have put forward possible solutions to these. The thesis also proposes a better and perhaps the best suited protocol for communication between E-Passport and the Terminal.
Finally, the thesis attempts to see if e-passports can be used in other areas as well, besides border control. As a case study, the thesis performs this analysis on electronic voting and puts forward some recommendations on how e-passports, following different e-passport protocols, may be used with different e-voting schemes.
Further details regarding the thesis can be made available upon request.