Master List signing on agenda in Nigeria

Entrust has expressed its support for the creation of Master List Signing during this week’s ICAO Regional Seminar on Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), biometrics and security standards in Abuja, Nigeria.

“While full adoption of Master List creation and signing is still on the horizon, its benefits are too important to ignore,” says Bill Conner, president and CEO, Entrust. “We fully support this initiative — so much so, Entrust has enabled a Master List Signing certificate profile within the upcoming release of our ePassport security solution. This will enable our customers to strategically develop their Master List Signing capabilities from a trusted security partner.”

The Master Signing List is a method to reduce duplication that exists in the current ePassport verification process. Once a certain number of countries have imported the signature verification keys from a number of issuing countries, a level of assurance develops in the veracity of the verification keys. If they then publish those keys in Master Lists, a third country can import the Master Lists — along with the verification keys of those countries that signed them — and validate them with an understanding that there has already been some assurance established in the keys on the Master Lists.

“With the judicious application of import rules, the third country can achieve the required level of assurance in the authenticity of some or all of those keys — without incurring the full expense, time-delay and inconvenience of independently importing them directly from the issuing countries,” says Entrust.

During this week’s event, Entrust will also demonstrate advanced capabilities in Basic Access Control (BAC) and Extended Access Control (EAC) technology. The company claims it is currently the only security vendor that offers a dual-rooted ePassport solution, which enables organisations to deploy BAC ePassports and then seamlessly migrate to EAC ePassports from a single platform.

“Even though some countries aren’t yet required to issue EAC ePassports, Entrust believes providing a dual-rooted platform will ease and simplify global adoption of the technology,” says Conner. “This capability is especially attractive for governments who haven’t started ePassport deployment but want to maximise their investment and be ready for the upcoming EAC standard.”

Countries are in the process of evolving their ePassport programs to a second-generation framework that includes capabilities for EAC. EU member countries will be required to add fingerprint data to machine readable travel documents (MRTDs) with the biometric information protected through the EAC scheme by June.

The ICAO event, hosted with the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), brings together national security agencies, civil registries, national and other identity issuers and managers, passport-issuing agencies, immigration, customs, police, civil aviation, facilitation and other border control and security authorities.