During Trustech 2023 Silicon Trust caught up with Robert Bach from Infineon to let him explain Infineon’s demo concerning the world’s first ePassport with PQC version of the EAC Protocol. If you want to learn more on PQC, perhaps you should register for our upcoming Webinar of the subject on the 10th April? Click the button below…
TRANSCRIPTION: This is the world’s first ePassport, entirely based on Post Quantum Cryptography. This demonstrator has been developed in a funding project and a cooperation between Infineon, the German Bundesdruckerei and the Fraunhofer ISI in Germany. The main target of this demonstration is to prove that you can make an electronic passport based on a standard security controller that is today, commercially available on the market and also based on post quantum cryptography. One of the targets was that the transaction time of this electronic passport should not be slower than one of today current electronic passports.
Now I will show you an original border control terminal, how that works. So on the screen you will see the picture, is actually what a German border control officer would see. They would start the whole process and the completed transaction of the border control process will run. Actually what you can see here is it’s taking pictures of the infrared light, it’s taking pictures of the ultra violet light and also taking pictures of the content which can be seen on the passport, and of course it reads out all of the electronic data, and as a result there is nothing seen specific. So the passport seems to be okay. You can compare the infrared light with a sample passport, or the control officer would control the ultraviolet light picture, and we can even can see all the pictures of the face at the same time and check if there’s any attempt of a fraud or so.
The old transaction, as you have seen, was in less than 3 seconds, and only the electronic part was in less than 1.5 milliseconds. All of the electronic contents have been authenticated and read out just using post quantum cryptography. For this demonstration, we implemented two algorithms. The Kyber for the main transaction as a key encapsulation mechanism, and the Dilithium as a signature algorithm. And both algorithms are in the final as candidates in the process and selection process of the NIST competition. Finding the new post quantum cryptography algorithms for the future.