Malaysia Airlines flight 370 has been missing since March 8, and there are many speculations as to what happened to the Boeing 777. One thing we do know for sure is two individuals from Iran used stolen passports to board the plane. According to reports, the stolen passports were of a 61-year-old Australian and a 37-year-old Italian; in contrast the two Iranian brothers that used them were 19 and 29 years old. Even if the 29-year-old led a very hard life, it was very doubtful he looked 61, which clearly highlights the need to implement a better global passport verification system.
WidePoint Corporation, provider of managed mobility solutions as well as cybersecurity, identity and data assurance, announced a partnership with Mount Airey Group inc. to provide ePassport Certificate Management and Validation as part of its PIVotal ID Managed Validation Services.
The new cloud-based platform allows inspection and quality assurance systems to verify the digital security features of ePassports globally. The protocols of this solution conform to the standards that have been set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
WidePoint is using the Ozone ePassport technology from Mount Airey because of its proven technology and flexibility for adoption without the installation of large and expensive infrastructure to support the system.
Ozone E-Passport Validation provides:
- ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD) interface support
- Configurable X.500 directory precedence for data sources
- XACML/SOAP interface for e-Passport Document Signer Certificates
- Extended algorithm support, unnamed ECDSA curves & RSA-PSS
- ICAO Master Certificate List management support
- Black list capability for explicitly untrusted signers and FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules
The system can also be configured with grace policy specific to each country and it can be localized for the implementation of each country with a secure audit trail.
The quality assurance of the platform is able to perform real-time document issuance quality checks along with detailed encoding checks by verifying endpoint border security results. The system can be integrated seamlessly with issuance systems so it can quickly profile e-Passport against the latest standards while asserting proper policy enforcement.
With more than 110 million people going in and out of the United States in 2013, it is extremely important to implement a platform that is able to electronically verify e-Passports nationwide to ensure the safety of all passengers. As of right now the infrastructure to verify e-Passports is not readily available at every airport.
"WidePoint's PIVotal ID validation service manages Master Certificate Lists for Country Signing CA certificates that establish trust points for each country,” said William Russell, CTO of Mount Airey Group. “By leveraging our Ozone ePassport solution, WidePoint's Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant validation service obtains the relevant digitally signed validation data from issuing country repositories, validates the document signer certificates and trust chain, and services validation requests from inspection systems."
Edited by
Alisen Downey
