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Inside's ICAO-Lite platform open doors for TIL Technologies

29/07/2010

First Commercial ICAO-Lite Deployment Provides Secure, Intelligent Credentials for both Access Control and Identity

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, July 29th, 2010 – Celebrating its first commercial deployment, INSIDE Contactless, a leading provider of advanced, open-standard contactless chip technologies, today announced its MicroPass ICAO-Lite platform has been chosen by TIL Technologies to power a new generation of highly secure access control and identity systems employing intelligent credentials.  TIL Technologies is using INSIDE’s MicroPass 5103 ICAO-Lite chip to create contactless access control and identity badges specifically designed for use at highly sensitive facilities, such as airports, seaports, military and government installations, industrial complexes and infrastructure sites, and has developed a family of programmable multi-protocol readers based on INSIDE technology to interrogate the badges.

“We are entering a new era in access control where intelligent credentials are employing microprocessors and cryptography to protect personal identification and other valuable data and achieve much higher levels of security,” said Bertrand Moussel, executive vice president sales, EMEA, LATAM at INSIDE Contactless.  “Our MicroPass ICAO-Lite platform is ideally suited to provide a flexible, cost-effective solution for combining standards-based identity with access control and other value-added applications.”

INSIDE’s ICAO-Lite platform employs a unique partitioned memory architecture that allows it to store both static, secured biometric data for identity applications, such as photographs and fingerprint scans, that can be read by any ICAO-compliant reader, as well as variable data to support value-added applications such as access control.  Data cohabitation and integrity is guaranteed by the on-chip RISC microprocessor and memory management unit.  TIL Technologies has taken advantage of this platform to provide the additional security mechanisms required for access control applications, such as anti-cloning and card/reader authentication, to create their hybrid access control/identity solution.

“TIL believes the era of memory-based access control solutions is ending as security requirements become more stringent, and we are in the process of migrating our customers to a new generation of systems that employ intelligent credentials,” said Gines Linares President at TIL Technologies.  “INSIDE was able to quickly create a custom MicroPass ICAO-Lite solution to meet the specific requirements of our application, and the flexibility and power of their solution provides us with a platform we can use to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”
By combining ICAO-standard identity with access control, the TIL Technologies solution allows the same badge used to gain access to sterile areas at an airport, for example, to also be used for identity using the existing ICAO-standard e-Passport readers and other devices already in place for passport control or other identity applications.

ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) has set standards for e-Passports and e-Visas that rely upon the use of contactless chip technology and a large EEPROM memory to store high-resolution biometric data and other identity information.  By reducing the memory size for the ICAO-Lite platform and utilizing the same core MicroPass technology it already produces in huge volumes for the banking industry, INSIDE Contactless has been able to take advantage of economies of scale to deliver an extremely cost-effective solution.
Since it was first launched at CARTES in November of 2005, the MicroPass intelligent payment platform has achieved its unprecedented success by continuing to deliver superior performance and flexibility, and is now the platform of choice for certified card manufacturers around the world.  Shipments of INSIDE’s award-winning MicroPass® intelligent payment platform recently surpassed the 200 million unit mark, with production volume doubling in the 18 months since reaching 100 million units in November 2008.

Geraldine Sauniere
Marcom Director
Tel. +33 (0)4 42 39 33 01
Fax: +33 (0)4 42 39 63 19
www.insidecontactless.com
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