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Infineon Technologies AG has been awarded the chip card industry’s prestigious Sesames Award 2012 for the most innovative product in the category Transportation. The SOLID FLASH™-based SLS 32TLC security controller from Infineon is the industry’s first solution that supports conventional public transportation implementations as well as CIPURSE™, the newly defined open standard for the transport industry.
It is the ideal migration product to upgrade existing ISO 14443 -3 type A with CRYPTO1 compliant transport solutions (NRG) to CIPURSE standard, based on AES128 encryption.
The award was announced on the eve of the opening of the Cartes 2012 trade show in Paris (November 6-8, 2012). An international panel of independent experts active in the chip card industry selected the winners in ten different categories from a total of 475 submissions.
“Infineon will offer CIPURSE products for a broad range of contactless applications such as limited use tickets, multi application cards and NFC-based mobile payment applications.”, says Thomas Rosteck, Vice President & General Manager Secure Mobile & Transaction of the Chip Card & Security Division at Infineon Technologies. “Infineon will offer CIPURSE products for a broad range of contactless applications such as limited use tickets, multi application cards and NFC-based mobile payment applications.”
The security chip features outstanding robustness and significantly enhanced contactless technology crucial for flexible and efficient access control and transit fare solutions. With this CIPURSE-compatible security controller, operators and transport agencies take advantage of high-level, microprocessor-based transactions. These will be available on smart cards, mobile phones and similar devices for highly flexible applications such as monthly or annual tickets and loyalty programs.
CIPURSE is an open standard for secure transport fare collection solutions defined by the OSPT Alliance and supported by leading technology companies such as Giesecke & Devrient, Infineon Technologies, INSIDE Secure and Oberthur technologies. Further information about the OSPT alliance is available at http://www.osptalliance.com
Infineon also announced at CARTES that its high-performance communication interface for Near Field Communication (NFC) applications is gaining wide acceptance as a de facto industry standard. The Digital Contactless Bridge (DCLB) interface specified by Infineon offers fast and secure connection between an embedded Secure Element and an NFC modem. As a freely available and globally open solution, DCLB is widely implemented by manufacturers of NFC modems and Secure Elements for handsets. To date, more than 10 manufacturers including Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), Inside Secure, MicroPross, MtekVision, Crocus Technology and KEOLABS have licensed the Infineon DCLB interface.
“We strongly support open solutions such as the DCLB interface as they accelerate mass deployment of a new technology,” says Juergen Spaenkuch, Vice President and General Manager Platform Security of the Chip Card & Security Division at Infineon Technologies. “In contrast to proprietary solutions provided by a single supplier, broadly accepted standards increase compatibility of various devices and allow system integrators to choose among a variety of offerings.”
Infineon defined the DCLB interface to provide an effective solution for secure NFC applications requiring fast response time such as mobile payment, access control or ticketing in public transport. It improves performance of the connection between an NFC modem device and the Secure Element where the transaction is partially executed by supporting peak data rates of 848 kilobits/second (kB/s). This is almost eight-fold the volume of data compared to other interfaces. In addition, Infineon’s security controller is the first embedded Secure Element awarded with the highest security certificate, the Common Criteria EAL 6+ (high), by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
“For NFC to quickly achieve wide market coverage, the consumer must be able to rely in the secure handling of his data and expects convenient handling of the technology,” says Alex Green, senior research manager for financial and ID technology at IMS Research, recently acquired by IHS. “With innovative solutions and product engagement in the NFC ecosystem, Infineon contributes to bringing NFC to the mass market.”
The importance of various NFC applications including mobile payment or ticketing in public transport is gaining momentum. Worldwide shipments of NFC-enabled handsets are expected to grow from 79 million units in 2012 to 900 million units in 2016, representing 44 percent of all handsets. Shipments of NFC Secure Elements used for such handsets or PCs are expected to increase from 120 million units in 2012 to 1.3 billion units in 2016 (“The World Market for NFC – 2012 Edition”, IMS Research, an IHS company, January 2012).