News
Smartrac Achieves EAL6 Certification at eID Production Site
February 2016 by Marc Jacob
Smartrac has obtained Common Criteria EAL6 certification for its Thailand production site, allowing the qualified handling of EAL6 certified products supplied by chip and chip operating system providers. Since Smartrac is the first company in the world with EAL6 certification for OS loading onto flash memory chips, customers will benefit from significantly increased manufacturing flexibility.
Smartrac was one of the first inlay manufacturers to achieve the level of security certification that silicon chip manufacturers and chip operating system providers have set as a standard for their recent products. As of today, Smartrac is the only company to have received EAL6 certification for OS loading onto flash memory chips, which must follow a qualified secure handling procedure.
By being certified to do this, Smartrac can even better meet customer expectations for faster delivery times, since it reduces the time-consuming logistical step of getting chips packaged into modules by the chip suppliers. Hence, Smartrac now has the flexibility required to supply small, medium and high volumes at short notice.
Compared to EAL5, EAL6 certification requires an enhanced secure IT infrastructure, including firewall, virtual private network (VPN) and intrusion detection system/intrusion protection system (IDS/IPS), as well as excellent perimeter security.
Serving customers better with certified OS flash loading
“As the global leader in high-quality and high-security RFID inlays for identity documents, we are delighted to obtain EAL6 certification. With this new certification we are enabled to include OS loading onto flash memory chips, and uniquely positioned to serve our customers better than anyone else”, says Ralf Henn, Senior Vice President, Secure ID & Transactions Business Division at Smartrac.
The “Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation” (abbreviated as Common Criteria or CC) is an international standard (ISO/IEC 15408) for computer security certification. The Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL1 through EAL7) of an IT product or system is a numerical grade assigned following the completion of a Common Criteria security evaluation.
EAL certifications for inlay production processes are granted by several certification bodies, for instance by the French “Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information” (ANSSI) or the German “Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik” (BSI).
