Optical Security Document Simulator for Black-Box Testing of ABC Systems

Ever increasing passenger numbers have prompted the rise of automated border control (ABC) systems. Such systems are expected to perform the identity check of a traveler with the same or higher reliability as a human border guard. One important aspect of such a control is the authentication of the identity document provided by the traveler. To ensure a constant quality of the authentication process it is necessary to subject the ABC system to a thorough testing on a number of different document samples. Given the ever increasing number of eGates in operation all over the world, this testing becomes a technically infeasible task, which may have severe security implications. In this paper, we propose a system that can automate such quality assessments using an optical document simulator. Our simulator uses a similar principle as that of an active display attack, where a mobile device is used to trick automated document readers.