Your e-Passport contains an NFC chip that is signed by the government that attested to your identity.
Verifying the signature of the data can help us check its integrity but this does not guarantee the passport is authentic, anyone could sign the data and pretend to be the State that issued the passport. This is where enters the second step in the process. The public key corresponding to the private key used to sign the data (along with other information that forms what we call a certificate) is itself signed by the issuing State "master key". This private key is (hopefully) stored with extreme caution by the State, away from any prying eyes, and is what we call the trust anchor of the whole system. If anything is signed by this private key we can safely assume only the State could have done it (cryptography is generally based on quite a few assumptions, just got to make sure it's a good one). The associated public key is public knowledge, thus we can retrieve it and verify that the signature over the public key associated to the private key used to sign the data is indeed from the issuing State. If it is, then we can be sure the passport is authentic.
Comments3
ugwuoga
Dec 26, 2025
I'm sorry really happy to join this application
ugwuoga
Dec 26, 2025
Please how can I borrow a bitcoin on this app
Niall Cheetham
Dec 1, 2025
Your e-Passport contains an NFC chip that is signed by the government that attested to your identity.
Verifying the signature of the data can help us check its integrity but this does not guarantee the passport is authentic, anyone could sign the data and pretend to be the State that issued the passport. This is where enters the second step in the process. The public key corresponding to the private key used to sign the data (along with other information that forms what we call a certificate) is itself signed by the issuing State "master key". This private key is (hopefully) stored with extreme caution by the State, away from any prying eyes, and is what we call the trust anchor of the whole system. If anything is signed by this private key we can safely assume only the State could have done it (cryptography is generally based on quite a few assumptions, just got to make sure it's a good one). The associated public key is public knowledge, thus we can retrieve it and verify that the signature over the public key associated to the private key used to sign the data is indeed from the issuing State. If it is, then we can be sure the passport is authentic.
More information can be found here:
https://github.com/zkpassport/circuits