Like Americans in Queensland and several states across the Atlantic, the French could soon just hand over their smartphone to prove their identity. This “electronic passport”, which must see the light of day by 2026, according to a European regulation, Thales, which produces in the historic cradle of the smart card in Gémenos (Bouches-du-Rhône), is ready to distribute it widely. The security specialist’s smart cards already allow you to integrate your driving license onto your phone. For the future passport, “the phone’s smart card will contain an integrated identity verification element, a secret key. For older phones, we have developed a 100% software solution, which we regularly have ethical hackers test”explains David Jencel, digital document product manager at Thales.
This biometric passport is one of the latest innovations proposed by the French multinational and presented to the press in its offices in Gémenos, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the smart card, invented in 1974 by Frenchman Roland Moreno. The La Ciotat and Gémenos sites, which today have nearly 1,000 employees, were first those of Gemplus, a specialist in the manufacturing of smart cards intended for telecoms and bank payments. In 2006, this spin-off of STMicroelectronics then merged with the Dutch Axalto, thus giving birth to Gemalto, acquired in 2019 by Thales.
One in three bank cards
In the Gémenos assembly workshop, some 20 million cards are produced each month, 90% of which are intended for the banking sector. The first step is to glue the chip to a reel of metallized film, similar to old cinema reels. A second machine welds these two elements using 20 microns of pure gold, allowing the electrical connection. Coated in a resin and polymerized, the product is then protected in a box. Once the final tests have been carried out, the chip is assembled on a card, personalized with the customer’s name before being sent to them during the day. In total, Thales provides one in three bank cards in France, from its Tours (Indre-et-Loire) and Gémenos sites.
Within the digital identity and security innovation and manufacturing laboratory, director David Byrne presents the bank card models offered by the group. Because if payment by card from a mobile phone is growing strongly (+ 137% in 2022, with nearly 6% of payments by proximity card, according to the Banque de France), some 77 million physical cards are still in circulation. France in 2023, according to the French bank card network CB.
But they are being renewed: in metal, with an LED light that flashes when you make a payment, or even equipped with a biometric sensor to validate a payment using a fingerprint… Latest, the “talking card”, developed by Thales with fintech Handsome, should prevent bank fraud against visually impaired people. “We created a Bluetooth communication channel between the card and an app on the user’s phone. This allows the latter to hear the amount of the transaction via the speaker of their smartphone before validating it.specifies Frédéric Martinez, the marketing manager for the group’s telecoms and security solutions. The manufacturer produces 25% of its cards from recycled plastic.
Gradual dematerialization
But faced with increasing digitalization, the smart card is set to evolve towards an intangible environment, like the eSIM, integrated into certain telephones and the payment application Apple Pay. “Today, a customer who buys the latest iPhone in the United States without a SIM card can download a secret key that allows them to identify themselves with a telecom operator in a few minutes”explains Bernard Noël, the manager of the La Ciotat site, where 700 people of 30 different nationalities work.
The engineers there notably developed the image recognition system for the Parade anti-drone device, used by the army during the Paris Olympic Games, and worked on securing communications between the planes and the control tower. Tomorrow, “Secure chips could be the guarantors of trustworthy artificial intelligence by protecting the integrity of data and AI models embedded in our phones”assures Ali Zeamari, innovation manager at Thales Digital Identity and Security. Ambitions driven by the dozen acquisitions of companies in the field of cybersecurity made since 2014 by Thales, which today has 6,000 experts in this field.
Source: www.usinenouvelle.com
