New security controller for ePassports

Enabling eight times faster contactless read time by electronic readers, the new security controller is able to process immigration security checks as efficiently as possible despite the increased amount of data. This faster contactless read time avaerages less than one second, a major benefit to both travelers and airport operators.

Carsten Loschinsky, Head of the Government ID business line at Infineon Technologies, comments: “With 3-times greater storage density and 8-times faster data-transmission speed compared to alternatives, the SLE78 with Integrity Guard is best prepared for future generations of e-passport. Infineon security controllers with Integrity Guard are established as the leading solution on the market for electronic documents with long-term validity such as passports and identity cards. We are now further extending our lead.”

Security controller requirements are dramatically increasing in terms of memory capacity and processing speed: electronic passports will be required to store a larger amount of data in the medium term than they do today. This is in order to comply with the International Civil Aviation Organization LDS 2.0 Standard.

The new security chip offers the industry’s highest memory density of 700 kBytes in an extremely small space. The new SLE78 offers up to 500 kBytes of flash-based memory capacity for variable data and approximately 200 kBytes of space required for program code. The SLE78 can securely store a great number of electronic visas, electronic entry and exit stamps and loyalty points for frequent traveler programs. Alternative solutions based on ROM technology only provide a capacity of 144 kBytes. Since most of this is used to to store passport data such as nationality, issue date, etc., ROM-technology soon reaches its limit for new generations of electronic passports.

Compliant to ISO/IEC 14443 with a 6.8 Mbit/s data rate, the new SLE78 security controller uses the Very-High-Bit-Rate protocol to process large amounts of data as quickly as possible at border controls. The VHBR protocol also improves the stability of contactless communication between the electronic passport and the corresponding reader.

Infineon’s ‘Integrity Guard’ digital security technology means that the chip is suited to meet the growing security requirements of electronic identification documents. With Integrity Guard, data is stored and processed in encrypted form by two mutually monitoring CPUs.

The 16-bit security controller is available in various versions: as chip with a contactless interface or as dual-interface chip (SLE78CLFX500VPH) that combines both a contact-based as well as a contactless interface.