Cross Match claims Berlin test success

Cross Match Technologies is claiming to have been able to read all ePassports presented to it during this year’s ePassport Interoperability test, which took place from 29 May until 1 June in Berlin, Germany.

The event, which was organized by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), and others, was designed to understand how well chip-based ePassports have been designed and how fast and easily they can be read by the passport readers from different manufacturers currently available on the market.

All in all, more than 170 companies and organizations participated in the interoperability test, and more than 450 people from 38 nations attended the event overall.

Although the official test results are still being calculated, Cross Match said that its own analysis showed that for the third testing event in a row its AUTHENTICATOR reader was able to read all of the ePassports it was presented.

Analysing its results further, Cross Match claims that its reader took less than 8 seconds to read and analyze all data from the e-Passports, from the time the passport was placed on the device, until the time the analysis of the data was completed (the company told SDW that this time was achieved without switching off any document checks – something which a number of other manufacturers were said to have done in order to speed up their apparent reading times).

Cross Match told SDW that it has used these latest figures to estimate the time it would take to process a complete EU passport with fingerprints in an Extended Access Control scenario. This would add approximately two seconds to the total time, the company said, making a total likely read time in the region of 10 seconds.

Cross Match’s reader, similar to a number of other leading manufacturers, is a one-step device. This means there is no separate reading of the MRZ, no manual entering of personal data and no searching for the chip or the certificate. “This allows the officer to concentrate on the travellers instead of being concerned with the document reader device," said Uwe Richter, senior vice president of the Product Management Office of Cross Match Technologies.

Cross Match Technologies also said it used its own software rather than the Golden Reader Tool (GRT). (When discussing the results in Berlin, organisers criticised the over-reliance by companies of the GRT.)