A Note on the Relay Attacks on e-passports: The Case of Czech e-passports

The threat of relay attacks on authentication protocols is often well recognized, especially for contactless applications like RFID chips. It is, therefore, a bit surprising to meet an implementation that actually encourages rather than eliminates these attacks. We present our experimental observations concerning Czech e-passports. These show clearly an inherent weakness rooted in lower layers of ISO 14443. As the behavior is unavoidable, it induces a question on whether the epassport should not have used a different communication protocol or authentication scheme.