Infineon wins huge US e-passport RFID chips order

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 22 August 2006 04:01

Your IT - Home IT

German chip maker Infineon will supply the RFID chips for up to 15 million electronic passports to be issued by the US Government over a year.

RFID passports hold encrypted digitised personal information similar that held on existing passports that can be scanned and read and viewed on a computer screen. Facial recognition systems can be used to match digitised passport photos with the holder.

While RFID passports have come under scrutiny at recent security conferences, such as Black Hat and Defcon, the Infineon RFID chips come with extensive security features, including data encryption and surface shielding to prevent remote access from unauthorized readers at a distance.

With the Infineon chips, the passports can only be scanned up to a distance of about 10cm.

At the Black Hat security conference held in early August German researcher, Lukas Grunwald, demonstrated that he could access data from an RFID chip embedded in his own passport and copy it to another RFID chip embedded in a smartcard.

Grunwald accomplished the task using standard hardware and self-developed software. However, it is not clear what RFID chip was used or what level of security was installed on it.

The world is moving to e-passports embedded with RFID chips in large numbers, as they make processing of travellers much quicker and more efficient.