Infineon Technologies has announced it is supplying its semiconductor-based security chips to support Taiwan’s new electronic passport program. This is the second major project driven by the government of Taiwan that relies on security chips from Infineon. Infineon states it is the single supplier and has started shipping security chips of the SLE78 product family based on the digital security technology Integrity Guard, designed to offer particularly solid protection against unauthorized data manipulation. With Integrity Guard the card holder personal data is stored and processed by security chips integrated into the smart cards and electronic documents. Personal data is not only stored but also processed in encrypted form. Should a unit detect that an operation has not been properly executed, for example if somebody tries to manipulate the data, the ongoing processes are immediately halted.
