Fitting passports with biometric data
Published: 18 Aug 2004 15:45 BST
Proponents acknowledge these concerns. But they say they've included technology that will shield private information contained in e-passport memory chips and keep it from falling into the hands of unauthorised parties. Security systems are never perfect, but the internal systems on these chips will make it difficult to surreptitiously read (or alter) information the chips contain.
"You are not able to track a person except when tracking them in and out of a city," said Joerg Borchert, vice president of secure mobile solutions at Infineon Technologies. Governments already have that ability using old-fashioned passports, he added.
Infineon, the German chipmaking giant, has been active in moving the technology out of the labs and has been bidding on the various passport projects. It has begun to ship samples of two identification chips that it says can improve travel security and cut down on problems such as bank fraud because they contain more than 50 mechanisms designed to foil tampering.
At the same time, the company has tried to preserve privacy by including an encryption processor that scrambles data coming out of the identity documents and reducing the range for extracting data from the chips to just a few inches. The chips are "contactless," meaning that the information contained in them is extracted wirelessly by a reading device.
One of the chips will function as a smart card and contain information such as credit card numbers and insurance information, while the other, designed for passports, will contain only ID information such as facial images or fingerprints. The chips are available in sample quantities now but will go into high-volume production by the end of the year.
Passports, please
The push for better passports began in 1997 under the guidance of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, or ICAO, a UN agency. An ICAO technology working group was charged with establishing better security standards for travel documents, standards that could be applied worldwide and would be cost effective.
In 2002, ICAO came out with what is called the "New Orleans Resolution" (named after the city where it was voted on). In the resolution, ICAO endorsed facial recognition as the biometric identification technology of choice, with fingerprints and iris scans as optional, supplemental forms of biometric identification.
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