Biometric electronic passports will be made available to 23 million Taiwan citizens by the second half of 2008, according to Computerworld Singapore. The country awarded its National Identity System contract to Hewlett-Packard.

To meet international security standards, the NIS will integrate products from Entrust, Safenet, 3M and Cryptometrics, with 64K contactless chips. The chip will contain the passport holder’s digital photo and detailed passport information in electronic form. The country would endorse the data stored on the chip to ensure the passport was not altered.