What's the latest on National ID Cards?
 

Seems that they'll be easy to clone :(

UK electronic passports cloned within minutes - vnunet.com

TX.

Anyone who doesn't have their ID card by now will be shot :smug:

Its easier just to tattoo a barcode number on your arm.....

Like they did over there in WW2 you mean?

Les :(

Quite - we have to identify ourselves to the state it seems. I quite like this blog post on the subject :-

"Let me make this clear; my identity is just that, mine. It is not yours, it is not the state’s, it is mine and mine alone. It is up to me to decide who will be privy to information about that identity. I will not, absolutely not, be fingerprinted like a criminal in order to satisfy your obsessive control freakery. This is not negotiable…

We are opposed [to ID cards] because they will make minimal or no contribution to the prevention of terrorism, illegal immigration or whatever the problem du jour is, while causing maximum inconvenience and invasion of privacy for the law abiding citizen. They will reverse the relationship between you, the representative of the state (servant) and us, the electorate (master). I recommend that you remind yourself of this principle. I do not intend to serve you or prove to you who I am, because it is none of your business."

Thanks chaps! What is the latest info on them though :wonder:

TX.

The determined will copy them and clone them. It therefore probably makes serious crime and terrorism easier, but dodging Blockbuster fines harder!

Politicians squandering our money again just to be 'seen' to be doing something. Pathetic!

D

A couple of things: that story may suggest that you can add or remove data to a new passport, what it doesn't explain is how this would be accepted as a genuine passport in a 'live' system - the golden reader may well accept the data as legitimate because it conforms to the right protocols and uses the right layout and type iof data.

However, in a real live system there is an additional step whereby you would have to check with a certificate authority to ensure that the digital certificates contained within the passport are genuine. The checksum used when the data was first put on the chip would be changed when the data was changed. Unless you were somehow able to adjust the checksum and manipulate the certificate authority, the passport would be returned as invalid when read.

This is a slightly simplistic view, but it shows that the Times' story is incomplete. As an aside, my company is involved with providing equipment that is used in the validation and checking stages for PKI systems, around which any ID scheme would be based.

We have had enquiries about providing equipment for a PKI system involving 100's of millions of certificates - the end customer has not been revealed, but you can draw your own conclusions as to who it is :)

They're going ahead with them, I got an email saying we had won the contract. Thats all I know :)