Digital Identity

Facing up to reality

[Dave Birch]  It's not particularly surprising that you can get into the Department of Homeland Security with a fake Mexican ID (address "123 Fraud Blvd").  No-one ever looks at IDs properly, so it doesn't matter what you put on them.  In any case, how would someone know whether a Mexican ID card is valid or not?  You need tamper-resistant chips and digital signatures to do this properly, not pictures and receptionists.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, ID cards

Home biometric fun

Here's some face recognition fun.  There's a site called riya.com that I've been playing with.  Basically, you upload photos to the site a bit like Flickr except the site runs face recognition software: it picks faces out of the photos: you label them (eg, Dad).  Then you can upload more photos and search for "Dad": the software performs face recognition on the photos you've uploaded.  It didn't work perfectly, but I thought the fact that it worked at all was quite interesting.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, internet

Two fingers to the passport

I am very excited: something very special happened the other day.

My front door bell rang, I bounded down two floors of stairs to get there in time to find a delivery man from SMS (Secure Mail Services that IPS uses to deliver passports). Having signed, I took delivery of my seven-year-old son's replacement passport.

Back upstairs I opened the envelope to discover that he has been issued with a biometric passport, complete with smart chip and antenna embedded in a page at the back. When we get back from Turkey, I'll take it straight to our lab in Guildford for testing. Last time I did something like this, I found something surprising :)

The Elephant in the room

[Dave Birch] Off to the British Bankers' Association seminar on Identity Fraud to hear an "Update on Identity Cards" by Stephen Harrison, Director of Policy, UK Passport Services and Identity Cards programme.  Having promised myself that I wouldn't bore readers of the new Digital Identity Blog with yet more about the UK ID card, the truth is that for many businesses and other organisations trying to develop identity management policies, the ID card is the elephant in the room.  Now, clearly, my clients (eg, card issuers) are potential big users of ID cards so they need to know exactly how it is all going to work for them so that they can start planning.  Since, according to Mr. Harrison, the government will start issuing them in only three years time, they ought to be part of short- to medium-term strategies now.  So, for example, what should a bank put into its branch strategy because of the ID card?

Technorati Tags: banking