Secure Credential Derivation for Paperless Travel

Abstract

The international travel spectrum is a challenging environment, in which participants have aims that are often at odds with one another. The traveller wants to be able to plan his schedule ahead of time and travel conveniently, avoiding long lines and unexpected issues. In this paper, we have discussed a solution to meet the demands of stakeholders and service providers, who strive to detect security concerns, innovate and improve their service quality and utilize the resources at their disposal for the traveller’s need for comfort and privacy. In the current travel space, travel is dependent on physical documents, biometric verification utilising data of face and fingerprint, long immigration and departure lines. Instead, we propose a unique solution to address this issue, based on an electronic travel document stored in the phone of the traveller in the form of a QR code, protected by cryptographic procedures without compromising on privacy. We have also discussed the flaw in existing solutions and have proposed a novel solution with a unique set of algorithms and a digital certificate to address the same. The user can also use this novel method to avail multiple other facilities from the service providers at the destination without further need for verification or authorization. A prototype has been created and tested, proving expected benefits to all the stakeholders involved. The PACE algorithm used in this paper surpasses the BAC algorithm usually employed in chips because it is cryptographically more secure, due to its strong entropy and is independent of the randomness of keys.