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NXP Semiconductors reported Thursday that Germany became the first country to transition to its new e-passport technology known as SmartMX chip, which features faster read and write capabilities than the first generation used by 43 countries. France is expected to make the move next.
Germany's new e-passport will store the holder's fingerprints and digital photograph. All countries in the European Union (EU) must begin issuing second-generation e-passports by mid-2009. The new e-passports must have a higher level of security than the technology used to protect data on current e-passports.
By using asymmetric cryptography based on elliptic curves, the information stored on the integrated circuit (IC) is kept secure. Each chip can store 80kb EEPROM, enabling the document to contain biometric information, such as the holder's photo and fingerprints along with name, date and country of birth, permanently locking the passport to the user.
The chips have a dedicated hardware firewall to protect specific sections on the chip. It's resistant to fault attacks, light, differential power analysis, among others, according to Jim Sheire, manager for government programs at NXP Semiconductors. "As we develop the technology, governments throw attacks at us," he says "That helps us innovate to higher security levels."
Sheire says the Government Printing Office that prints U.S. passports, using the older technology, estimates ramping up to 600,000 e-passports per week by early next year. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) sets passport standards to read passports issues by other companies. The keys are shared among counties to allow Germany to read the data on U.S. e-passports., for example.
Eindhoven, Netherlands-based NXP, a spin-off from Philips Semiconductors, estimates it holds about 80 percent of all e-passports programs globally, having shipped more than 100 million to date. Forty three of the 51 countries use NXP's smart-chip technology, including the United States, Italy, Russia, Thailand, among others.
Meanwhile, Texas Instruments (TI) unveiled the RF360, a smart card IC platform that targets the needs of contactless government eID mandates.
The company says the RF360 is the smallest IC platform in the market that integrates its ultra-low power MSP340 microcontroller, advanced embedded Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) and RF Analog Front-End (AFE) technologies.
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