ePassport Single Point Of Contact (SPOC)

Single Point Of Contact (SPOC) is the standardized mechanism for certificate management for Extended Access Control (EAC) for electronic passports. Each participating nation would establish a single SPOC interface that acts as a front-end for their domestic EAC components communicating with counterparts in other nations. All international EAC certificate requests and responses are communicated directly between SPOCs. Within a given nation, the SPOC gathers certificate requests from other SPOCs, delivers them to the domestic CVCA for handling, and communicates responses back to the requesting SPOC, on behalf of its domestic CVCA. The same SPOC also gathers certificate requests from domestic Document Verifiers (DV), forwards them to foreign SPOCs for processing, gathers responses from those foreign SPOCs and forwards those to the domestic DV that initiated the request.

The SPOC model and certificate management protocol were defined by the Brussels Interoperability Group (BIG), operating under the direction of the European Union Article 6 Committee. The specification was approved by the EU Article 6 Committee in June 2009.

Entrust has developed a BIG test SPOC facility that is available now. This Entrust demonstration site fully implements the standardized key management protocol that will be used across international borders, emulates a fully functional SPOC interface and enables users to test their SPOC implementations online. It is capable of registering other SPOCs, receiving and responding to Document Verifying (DV) certificate requests from registered SPOCs on behalf of its own Country Verifying Certification Authority (CVCA), as well as sending certificate requests to, and receiving responses from, other SPOCs on behalf of its own DV. The demonstration site includes separate synchronous and automated asynchronous endpoints, which allow full testing of all operations of the SPOC protocol in both synchronous and asynchronous modes.

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