Europe unveils E-passport 2.0

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 20 May 2008

Europe is moving to a new, safer e-passport, while SA has yet to introduce chips to its national travel document.

Roll-out starts in six months' time and all e-passports must be protected to the new standard by 2010.

Entrust Middle East and Africa territory manager Jeremy Boorer says the new standard is being driven by the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the 27-member European Union.

This is as a result of concerns about the first-generation RFID chip-enhanced e-passport and amounts to the biggest change in public key infrastructure (PKI) since its introduction in the 1970s.

Boorer says it was found the RFID chip used could be remotely "skimmed", hence the move to a new standard that offers "extended protection" through encryption that only allows authorised readers to scan the chip. The standard employs digital certificates and real-time verification of the passport with the issuing authority.

"There will be this whole network of certificate dispersion that will allow you to trust passports and validate them back to their country [of issue]. As you can imagine, that whole process can be horrendous..." Boorer says.

The UK will have 1 900 authorised scanners that must be able to authenticate not only British passports but also those of every other EU country and eventually also those from every other issuing authority on the planet, including SA's.

"You have to get [for example] France's and Denmark's authentication certificates to every machine then every other country has to do it... There is a whole process being developed now to do that because the certificates are only going to last three months. Previously, you had to take certificates in diplomatic bags and manually do this process, but with 1 900 machines and 27 countries that is impossible."

Boorer says the new standard "was not dreamt up by PKI professionals, this was pushed by politicians, if you like. So the complexities beneath it - and there are many - must be catered by the likes of us, the technology vendors."

The Department of Home Affairs earlier this month told Parliament an e-passport was one of 55 "turnaround" projects in progress.