Recognizing authentic passports from around the world
To make sure all passports are issued according to the same norms and interoperable with verification systems worldwide, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has published a set of standards, which countries need to comply with. One of these requirements is that each country emitting an ePassport also needs to publish a certificate which, once shared with other countries, will allow the latter to recognize an ePassport as being authentic. ICAO holds a global repository for all certificates, so that countries can both communicate their own and get those from other countries, in order to be able to read them when citizens holding a passport from that specific country cross the national borders. That repository is called the Public Key Directory.
Unsurpassed security
To answer the challenge of the countries that need to put in place a National Public Key Directory (NPKD) that is fully compliant, as well as easy to implement and maintain, Zetes offers a complete solution, including hardware, implementation and maintenance, based on Primekey’s NPKD software. The solution offers unsurpassed security and saves a large amount of work during the certificate exchange process. It addresses the needs of a country to have an efficient, secure and robust system of importing other nations’ certificates from the PKD, as well as exporting its own certificates.
The main characteristics of Primekey’s NPKD are:
- Download and upload from ICAO PKD.
- Store, inspect and publish to an NPKD LDAP server.
- Users are able to run detailed ICAO conformance checks and easily detect non-conformant CSCA certificates;
- Product developed by engineers involved in the development of EJBCA, Sign Server, SPOC and other ePassport solutions.
