secunet on the future of EES solutions

secunet has taken a lead in providing EES-compliant border control solutions and know-how for secure, efficient and future-proof implementations at air, land and sea borders.

Image courtesy of secunet

The company has used automation, clever design and process optimisation to ensure that time limits and the increasing number of passengers can be absorbed thoroughly and securely.

Airport Suppliers caught up with Michael Schwaiger – Senior Product Manager – secunet, to hear about the company’s new EES solutions.

Why have kiosks been handed a key role in the launch of the European Entry/Exit System? Will they handle the throughput?

The kiosks take the passenger away from time-consuming tasks such as the biometric data acquisition at manual border checks and free up the border control officer to concentrate on the tasks he or she is really needed for. The pre-enrolment of biometric data and prior interviewing of passengers is done by the kiosks – the officer should not be the one needing to advise passengers how to take photographs, for example. This is why so much work goes into the usability of the kiosks. Due to the integrated surveillance cameras and security functions, the passenger process can be continuously monitored. Kiosks also provide scalability to the whole system – their numbers can be quickly increased in border control scenario when needed. The time it takes the passenger to walk to the officer if referred is also valuable as it can be used for a one-to-many search on multiple databases, i.e. inside the EES.

Why is the quality of the biometric capture important for the EES?

Facial recognition capabilities have improved greatly over the past years and we can say it is now a well-proven technology, and fingerprints have been proven a long time. We need to have the right, secure biometric data to create an error-free identification, but it is a time-sensitive process as passengers have to connect to flights. Four fingers and a face image represent the best trade-off between speed and security. High quality of the collected biometric data is so important as you are talking about databases with over 100 million entries. The data and the search results need to be very, very precise.

What design approaches have you taken to this challenge?

Usability was also very important – illumination, height adjustment and more are provided by our solution which leads to a frontal image being taken each time. We had a great deal of experience from our previous eGate projects which also worked very well. The design of the system is of course optimised for each scenario. What we have ended up with is a very intuitive, smooth system that works well with the passengers and the security requirements, both for experienced travellers and those who may only use it once a year, for example.

Can you explain to readers the concept of anti-circumvention security?

The kiosk is by definition an unsupervised system – there is no officer standing by watching each passenger. This concept means providing a system that guarantees trust in the data that is being captured. It means providing powerful protection against face and fingerprint spoofing attempts. The kiosk is also recording surveillance images and footage that can be accessed by the border guard if needed. There are so many important aspects to this theme.

Why does secunet believe it has the edge in its EES solutions?

We have many proven products in this space and years of experience in designing and implementing eGate projects – as well as in stringent testing and flawless integrations. Apart from that, we participate in pilot projects in preparation for the introduction of the EES, for example, the pilot project for the use of kiosks at the land border crossing in Obrežje. We are also well versed in providing the very high-quality data that is required for strict but smooth border checks. We are also very experienced in finding the best trade-off between security and usability, and this gives us the edge.

For more information on this topic, please visit https://ees.secunet.com/en/