At the joint Smart Card Alliance annual meeting and CTST conference last week, the Smart Card Alliance Latin America (SCALA) says rapidly rising fraud rates due to skimming of magnetic stripe credit cards and shifts in fraud liability are fueling the migration of Latin American banks to smart cards based on the EMV standard.

An important change in the Latin American market is the chip liability shift program that protects the party that has upgraded cards or terminals if fraud occurs, according Kim Hangoc, vice president de Gesto de Produtos do Centro de Excelncia for MasterCard Worldwide. The program is across all of Latin America and has to do with liability for fraudulent transactions based on skimmed and cloned magnetic stripe cards.

After January 2005, if a cloned magnetic stripe from a chip-enabled card is used on a non-chip enabled merchant payment terminal, the acquirer is liable for the loss. If a skimmed magnetic stripe card is used in a chip-equipped terminal, the issuer is liable for the loss. Additionally, a domestic liability shift recently went into place in Brazil in March 2008, and is planned for October 2008 in Mexico and July 2009 in Venezuela. 

Atos Origin and Sagem, a unit of Safran, have reportedly won a contract worth around 80 million Euros to produce electronic passports for the French government, according to Le Journal du Dimanche. The first e-passports were due to be produced at the end of June. Also competing for the contract was Thales-Accenture, Capgemini-Sopra Group and Bull-Zeltes.

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At the opening of the “SID DisplayWeek 2008” in Los Angeles, Korean display manufacturer Samsung SDI and Germany’s Bundesdruckerei GmbH will present for the first time ever a passport featuring slim and bendable AMOLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display.

Even with the integrated color display, the data page of this e-passport made of polycarbonate is still only 700µm thin. According to the suppliers, tomorrow’s ID documents will work without contact and without internal batteries. The integration of a display makes electronic ID documents even more difficult to forge and opens up the way for new and different security applications. 

by Zack Martin, Editor

More than 100 enrollment centers have been opened and 90,000 cards have been activated for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential. At some point this year ports also are supposed to start testing card and biometric readers for the TWIC, says Gena Alexa, identification solutions architect in the Federal Systems Group at Unisys Corp. Alexa made the comments during a session at the CTST Conference, May 13-15 in Orlando, Fla. Unisys has been contracted to handle the TWIC deployment at the Port of LA in California.

One of the main issues for port operators, especially container terminals, is that terminal operator personnel make up a small percentage of the actual people coming in and out of the facility, Alexa says. The rest of the people coming in and out are not directly known from day to day.

In the Los Angeles/Long Beach area there are approximately 20,000 longshoremen that serve both ports, she says. On a given day, a container terminal may need 200 or more longshoremen per shift. The 200 that arrive to work for each shift will come out of the 20,000 local longshoremen but the terminal doesn’t necessarily directly know them. The situation is similar for the thousands of truckers who deliver and pick up containers each day. 

India will start issuing electronic passports to its government diplomats and officials in June, according to NewKerala.com. The new travel documents will be introduced to citizens within the next 11 months. For now the e-passports will contain a digital photo, but the Indian government might add fingerprints at a later date.

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While more than 100 million electronic passports have been issued in the last two years, more than 50 countries are still working on deploying the new travel documents, says Barry Kefauver, principal at Fall Hill Associates. “The bottom line is the new generation of passport is the most secure travel document the world has seen,” Kefauver says.

But issues remain, including remedying issues with breeder documents, rewriting the logical data structure and improving use of the biometric, Kefauver says. Government officials also need to do a better job of telling the e-passport story and allaying some of the fears individuals have about the documents. “There needs to be better packaging and telling of the e-passport story,” Kefauver says. “One resolve was we need to get the right story out to the right people in the right way.” 

Collis has introduced an NFC Two-factor Asymmetrical Chip Authentication application called NFC-2ACA—or NFC two-factor asymmetrical chip authentication. The application has been developed by integrating 2ACA into the contactless payment card protocols and the Near Field Communication protocol.

Collis has developed the 2ACA application that enables third-party authentication based on standard EMV implementations. Collis has enhanced this contact chip based 2ACA authentication scheme by integrating 2ACA into the contactless payment card protocols and the NFC protocol.