Slovenia going with second gen e-passports
10 September, 2008
category: Biometrics, Contactless, Government
Slovenia is going to deploy extended access control with its second generation electronic passport. Entrust Inc. will work with the country to implement the new security in the travel document.
Slovenia’s second-generation e-passport, which will be integrated by technology partner S&T, represent a components of the country’s citizen-centric e-government. Their e-government services enable secure time-stamping capabilities and helps provide secure applications for tax filing, vehicle registration, online establishment of companies, birth and marriage certificate requests, change of address certifications and other services.
Many countries are making the switch to second generation e-passports. European Union member countries will be required to add biometric data to machine-readable travel documents with the information protected through the EAC scheme by June 2009.
The second generation of ePassports, based on the extended access control (EAC) standard, enables governments to use a stronger biometric that is more difficult to impersonate on the contactless smart card chip, typically a fingerprint or iris scan. EAC ePassports also require the encryption of the chip contents, so even if a criminal has the ability to impersonate the enhanced biometric, access to the chip contents is denied with encryption.
Entrust provides security for the e-passports of a number of governments in the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand.