On 18 and 19 October, 25 railway representatives took part in a virtual meeting of the Ticket Security Group (TSG), chaired by Kurt De Vriendt, and the Ticket Layout Group (TLG), chaired by David Sarfatti.

The railway barcode ticketing experts updated UIC Flexible Content Barcode (FCB) security with Elliptic Curve DSA encoding and proposed a new header which allows double asymmetric encryption both by the ticket issuer and the railway application on the customer’s phone. IRS 90918-9 will be updated accordingly in 2021.

The TLG proposed a new rail ticket layout, named Universal Rail Ticket (URT), which would allow the customer to print or display on screen all of the information for several legs of a journey, and for several passengers on a single ticket. IRS 90918-8 will be updated accordingly in 2021.

During the afternoon, interesting presentations were given by Fabrice Setta on enhancements to the UIC Public Key Management Website (PKMW) (railpublickey.uic.org), by VdV eTS on its barcode ticketing IT architecture (vdv-barcode-mobile), and by Enrique Ruiz of Hit Rail on the UIC eTicket Control Database (ETCD) (https://uic.org/com/enews/nr/692/).

The next TSG and TLG plenary meetings will take place on 8 and 9 February 2021.