The Smart Card Alliance Physical Access Council has announced new officers and steering committee and upcoming projects for the next year. Upcoming activities include a white paper on interoperable identity credentials for the air transport industry, recommendations for enhanced Wiegand message formats to support FIPS 201-related implementations, and an in-person council session at the Smart […]

Cryptomathic has released a new product that the company says will accelerate the speed of inspecting electronic passports. There have been concerns about the time it will take for e-passports to be read at border checkpoints with extended access control (EAC) systems. EAC is an additional security protocol that will be used on European Union […]

CryptoMetrics, a developer of biometric technology, has announced that they have entered into a 25-year agreement with the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Ministry of Interior. The agreement makes CryptoMetrics the sole provider of face-recognition systems that are intended to augment the current security of the UAE and other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council and […]

Texas Instruments has unveiled its new secure multi-purpose contactless chip designed for the growing closed-loop contactless micropayment, loyalty, ID and access application markets. A number of closed-loop applications, particularly in Asia and in Central and South America, are seeking the speed, convenience and security of the ISO/IEC 14443 standards-based contactless technology that TI’s new chip […]

Slovenia is going to deploy extended access control with its second generation electronic passport. Entrust Inc. will work with the country to implement the new security in the travel document. Slovenia’s second-generation e-passport, which will be integrated by technology partner S&T, represent a components of the country’s citizen-centric e-government. Their e-government services enable secure time-stamping […]

NXP Semiconductors says its newest security chip processes transactions twice as fast, 3.5 seconds, as the current industry standard for contactless smart card chips. The SmartMX, the P5CD081, also features Secure Fetch technology, providing enhanced protection against attack scenarios with light and lasers (so-called fault attacks). NXP is involved in more than 85% of all […]

The U.S. Department of State has ordered an upgrade from Precise Biometrics, a fingerprint authentication technology developer, to its match-on-card system. The upgrade, costing $620,000, consists of adding Windows Vista support to the existing infrastructure as well as on-site support and integration services provided by Precise. The Precise Match-On-Card system enables the fingerprint data of […]