Reading NFC Passport Chips in Linux

The spec for machine readable travel documents is sadly not the most concise but if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details of how to validate documents, how to read data from them, etc then jump into ICAO 9303:

https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p10_cons_en...

https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p11_cons_en...

But please keep in mind that this is just the spec for how it's supposed to be implemented. Real world implementations of it have lots of creative interpretations of the spec in addition to straight bugs in their implementations, so if you're going to write software that has to work with various different documents issued by various governments, you'll have many fun debugging sessions :)

It seems every country that moves to electronic travel authorization has an app that requires me to verify my passport with this method. I have a fairly new passport, issued in the last few years, and a recent phone… and this process is a huge pain. I need to massage my passport with my phone for a minute, maybe I get a bite, hold it still… oops, start over… try again… okay, use our partner’s face ID recognition service instead… ugh it’s horrible.

I don’t know if the issue is the very low power chip in the passport, or some damage or what… but I dread the process any time I need to do it.

It's just a future fantasy that isn't fit for our dystopian world. I'm still waiting for the fantasy of fixed potholes.

Honestly, it’s better than “take a photo of your passport and upload it to our unsecured S3 bucket.”

Or id.me, as used by the IRS. "Scan your license, front and back"...

Front, 200dpi, "Unable to find a face in the image". 300dpi, "Unable to find a face in the image". Let's try lower, 72dpi, "Thank you".

Back, let's start at 72dpi, since that worked for the front. "Unable to read a barcode in the image". Higher, 200dpi, "Unable to read a barcode in the image". 300dpi? "Thank you".