The ICAO has defined the use of contactless chips and biometric identification embedded in passport booklets and datapages, in order to increase the level of border control security and prevent identity theft.
The U.S. Congress has introduced a roadmap for migration to contactless chip passports for citizens and visa waiver countries in order to strengthen the laws and processes of border control and immigration.The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the United Nations that sets standards for travel documents, recommends that such electronic passports be used to store biometric features for automated facial and fingerprint recognition.
Typically a digital facial photo and 2 or more fingerprint images are to be stored on a contactless high security microchip inside the passports protected by different types of security layers. Security mechanisms of the electronic chip inside an ICAO (DOC 9303) and EU (BSI-TR03110) compliant ePassport include passive authentication (PA) to prove data integrity, basic access control (BAC) or supplemental access control (SAC) for data privacy, active authentication (AA) for copy protection and extended access control (EAC) as an advanced security mechanism to protect sensitive holder information such us fingerprints.
The supplemental access control (SAC) protocol offers advanced resistance against skimming and eavesdropping of the passport using public key cryptography and is recommended for ICAO members from end of 2014 and mandatory for EU members issuing ePassports from this date.
MTCOS can be configured to meet all of these requirements. Just with BAC or including EAC, furthermore, with or without AA in both cases. SAC can be added with or without BAC. MTCOS supports random UID, our unique software anti skimming feature and other important security mechanisms to protect passport holders from unallowed tracking, passport cloning etc. MTCOS is designed and certified Common Criteria EAL4+ high according to PP0055, PP0056v1 and PP0056v2.
Brochure e-Passport with MTCOS (PDF/333.8 kb)