E-PASSPORT

The Ministry of External Affairs is soon going to issue a chip based passport. This Passport have International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)-compliant electronic contactless chip along with its operating system. The biggest and most beneficial factor In e-Passport is security. The personal details of the applicants will be digitally encrypted and stored in the chip, it makes it literally tamper-proof, in case it is tampered, the system will be able to identify it and the passport will not be authenticated.

E-Passport Uses:

• •  In a crowded airport, the e-passport will take a few seconds to read.
• • The back cover is expected to have a small silicon chip.
• • It will be smaller than a postage stamp and will have an embedded rectangular antenna. The chip will have 64 Kilobytes or more memory space.
• • Holder's photograph and fingerprints will be stored in the chip.
• • And will have the capacity to store 30 visits and international movements.

E-Passport Specification:

• •  E-Passport Chip is a contactless card fully compliance with 150 7816 and ISO 14443 standards..
• • It is suitable for the ICAO compliant e-Passport applications..
• • The card OS is suitable for multiple applications and Compliance to ICAO standard for Machine Readable Travel Documents. (MRTD) while ensuring Inter-operability in personalization of the passport. The card supports the file system as per the 150 7816 standards Supports algorithms like DES, TDES, SHA-1 and ISO/IEC 9797-1 based Integrity Algorithm.

Form Factor: Contact less and Chip
Chip specifications

• • 16-bit microcontroller/32-bit Microcontroller.
• • 628 kbytes EEPROM 12 kbytes RAM.
• • Contactless interface according to 150/IEC 14443 for type A Integrity Guard.
• • Crypto engine (Crypto@2304T) for public key cryptography RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with register lengths of up to 2304 bits Support of elliptic curves based on GF(p) and GF(2n) for key lengths up to 521 bits RSA calculations with key lengths of up to: - 2048 bits w/o CRT-4096 bits with CRT.
• • Symmetric Crypto Processor (SCP) for triple-key-triple DES and AES acceleration.
• • Robust set of threshold sensors and filters Light,temperature, frequency and voltage.

Security Mechanism:

ICAO Mandatory :	Basic Authentication Control (BAC)     • Access control to chip, to prevent unauthorized access (Reading & Writing)
ICAO OPTIONAL:	Active Authentication (AA)     • Chip Authentication to prevent cloning
EU Only :	Extended Access Control (EAC)     • Chip and Terminal authentication

Semi Conductors: SAMSUNG, INFINEON, ST MICRO