The PACE

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has adopted the password-based connection establishment protocol (PACE) for securing the contactless communication between the machine-readable travel documents and the readers at border controls. This Diffie-Hellman based protocol achieves impersonation resistance at password strength. To reinforce authentication of the travel documents beyond this lowentropy security, the challenge-response based active authentication protocol could be executed afterwards. However, this optional protocol is often omitted for efficiency reasons. In order to salvage strong security we investigate the possibility to provide active authentication almost "for free" with the PACE|CA protocol, by re-using some of the randomness from the PACE protocol for authentication.