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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, November 02, 2007

The EEPROM in your passport is getting bigger

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A press release from NXP announces a new generation of electronic (e-) passport chips that that company will supply to the German passport authorities. In this second phase, the on-chip memory capacity is increased to store not only your photo and textual details, but two fingerprints as well. Germany, the release tells us, is the first European country to implement an upgrade that will be an EU requirement by the end of June 2009.

That’s a fact that has been very little publicised here in the UK, where public opinion is extremely sensitive to the increasing levels of surveillance by the state on its citizens, especially if there’s an EU dimension. I’m looking forward with some relish to the moment the popular tabloid papers get their hands on that story – expect headlines of the form “Population to be fingerprinted like criminals in Brussels passport outrage”.

But, back to the NXP chip; it’s bigger, with 80k of memory (fine); it has better security with elliptic-curve cryptography (good, although not all authorities will likely follow the German lead of opting for the highest available level); and it comes in a thin, 250-micron package (suitable for “a variety of contactless eGovernment applications”) – which does has a slightly sinister ring to it. It’s also got protection against “light and laser attacks” and hardware firewalls. All good things, no doubt.

But most of all, for we helpless travelers, it has faster read and write speeds. I can only speak for my own experience but having recently been issued with an ePassport that bears my encoded photograph, I have found that it really slows down passport control. Previously the officer looked at your photo, looked at you, made a guess that the improbable portrait might be the same person, and waved you through. I guess the UK authorities might have opted for the budget version (it would be typical) but accessing the image from the embedded chip seems to take several seconds and markedly slows the whole process down – as if the hassle of getting through airports wasn’t bad enough. It is some sort of achievement to move to an electronic system from a purely manual one, and actually make the process slower.

Not that the technology is always the issue – at some of London’s airports there’s an iris recognition system that UK citizens can opt to register on, to bypass the passport-checking lines. Called, with great originality, “Iris”. It works well until, as happened to me on my last return, the queue ground to a halt while a visiting tourist was rescued from the eye-scanning booth, having completely failed to grasp that the system is only for those pre-registered. It’s amazing how fast the sense of self-satisfaction – that comes with being in a position to bypass a long line – evaporates when your own much shorter line stops completely.

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