Originally Posted by nzkarit

Don't know why they don't do passport verification with the phone app. Would have a similar level of trust as the kiosk.

I assume the kiosk reads the machine readable portion and then use that to access the chip. And validates that.

Given the data on the chip is signed and there is public key cryptography involved could build a server side system that could trust the passport data coming from the mobile app as much as the kiosk. If do the full key chain validation you would know that the data is signed by the passport issuers and hasn't been tampered with. You can then send the passport a nonce to sign to prove the passport is actually in communication with the phone and not just a replay attack. This would the same trust you can get out of a kiosk. as there is no human looking at it.