I don’t believe we picked up on this, from from silicon.com on the 1st of this month.
A “perfectly secure” electronic identity card will be in use in France by 2006, French Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy has announced. The card will carry a chip which will combine “the standard type of personal data you get in this type of document and an electronic certification system”. A digital authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used to guarantee the authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.
But when it comes to whether the card will contain biometrics, Sarkozy said it is still too early to tell but underlined that the card is still in the project stage. For Sarkozy, the potential applications for the card are far clearer, however. Citizens will be able to use the card with central government, local authorities as well as businesses, he said.
This next paragraph makes this sound particularly nasty:
The minister also announced that “a strategic blueprint for electronic public services from 2003 to 2007” will be published in the coming weeks. “It’s no longer up to the citizens to come to e-government, it’s up to e-government go to them”, he said.
They’re coming to get you.
But the question of the protection of personal data hasn’t gone away …
No indeed.
A digital authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used to guarantee the authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.
Remarks like this tend to irritate me.
Digital signatures cannot guarantee authenticity. All they guarantee is that the signed information has at some point passed throught the hands of someone with access to the secret key.
To guarantee authenticity you would also require that the officials running the system be incorruptible and that nobody obtaining an ID card can hoodwink an official into signing false information.
Agreed, any talk of “unforgeable” or “unique” betrays a wilful misunderstanding of the technology – not even the vendors of these systems actually make such claims, but politicians and journalists seem to.
At least the French citizens might get a usable Digital Certificate out the whole scheme. Under the Home Secretary David Blunkett’s compulsory ID card proposals, there does not seem to be any PKI element that the citizen will be able to use online e.g. to use the Government Gateway for Income Tax or EU farm subsidies or VAT etc
The Digital Certificates for these will still cost extra, on top of the fee for the Driving Licence, on top of the Passport fee and then the £40 plus ID Card poll tax as well.
You will be UH-SIM-UH-LAY-TED.