Move toward e-passports accelerates, SafeNet benefits

More and more countries are turning to e-Passports in order to provide a more effective ID to their citizens as they travel around the world. The twenty-seven countries which are members to the U.S. visa waiver program have an added incentives: In order for their citizens to be able to continue to enter the United States without an entry visa, these countries must equip their citizens with e-passports by the end of October this year; after October, member countries’ citizens who do not have an e-passport will have to stand in line at the nearest U.S. consulate and apply for a visa). One company benefiting from the trend toward e-passports is Belcamp, Maryland-based security giant SafeNet (NASDAQ: SFNT). The company’s Hardware Security Modules (HSM) have already been selected by government immigration departments in fourteen countries, among them Australia, Finland, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand to secure these countries’ electronic passport projects.

E-passport projects are managed by local government immigration departments as a preventive measure to combat irregular immigration and unauthorized data alteration. The passport is typically embedded with a chip containing personal information, a biometric identifier of the passport holder, and a digital signature. Digital signatures are a proven technology for data protection which reduces the risk of fraud and in turn reduces passport theft.

Note that the authenticity of a digital signature is only as trustworthy and secure as the corresponding digital signing key. SafeNet HSMs are purpose-built hardware appliances aiming to protect the digital signing key. The SafeNet HSM family of products comprises a range of hardware security solutions for digital identity applications which are available in both embedded and stand-alone versions. SafeNet says its HSM products offer true hardware key management to maintain the integrity of encryption keys, and that sensitive keys are created, stored, and used exclusively within the secure confines of the hardware security module to prevent compromise.

It is good to see that SafeNet HSMs also offer several advanced features not always found in competing products, among them direct hardware-to-hardware backup, split user role administration, multi-person authentication, and trusted path authentication. To all of this SafeNet brings much operational deployment experience in some of the largest PKIs in the world.