INSidER

Government ID cards continued

The saga continues. Now the House of Commons are getting in on the act.

The government estimates of a cost of £5.8bn are in themselves shocking, but more shocking is the fact that these are just the costs to the Home Office!!!

My personal views from having been one of the advocates of chip cards at Barclaycard are not those of a luddite or anti-card person, but i have BIG reservations about these id cards

1)    Cards are a distributed database... that means you freeze your technical upgrade path at the speed of renewing the oldest card. The cards are linked to passports which means potentially you have a 10 year renewal cycle. So once implemented you cannot upgrade or respond for 10 years to any flaws without incurring costs

2)    One of the main learnings from the banks is that the cards wear out much quicker than expected. There is a cost of renewal which is high when you are authenticating identity. Now this point does not mean that point 1 is negated because the cards wear out on usage and say 60% of cards get used regularly, the problem is about point 1 is that you cannot upgrade systems for 10 years because some guy will put his id card in a drawer and only trav3els abroad once every 10 years. The problem abbout point 2 is that failed cards will dramatically increase the re-issue of cards and re-authentication process for the 60% who use them regularly.

3)    Biometrics do not "prove identity". You can only ever "prove data". You are in biometrics trying to prove that the data generated by the image of a persons say finger print or cornea matches the data held on a datbase within a given margin of error. The problem here is the word database... how likely is it that the data on the data base will be accurate and if it is not how do you go about regaining your identity?

• Posted by roger on 13/02/2006.
• roger's site