Taiwan to issue e-passports

The Taiwanese government will start issuing e-passports to its nearly 23 million citizens by the end of 2008 in an effort to tighten border control and reduce the use of forged travel documents.

The government will use Dallas-based Entrust's public key infrastructure running on Hewlett Packard hardware to authenticate biometric information stored on machine-readable travel documents or e-passports.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will sign each applicant's digitised personal information and photograph with an Entrust digital signature for basic access control (BAC).

Entrust already provides BAC e-passport security for the US, UK, Slovenia, Singapore and New Zealand.