WebID-ISSUE-27 (bblfish): track electronic IDentity (eID) initivatives [liaison with other groups]

WebID-ISSUE-27 (bblfish): track electronic IDentity (eID) initivatives [liaison with other groups]

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/track/issues/27

Raised by: Henry Story
On product: liaison with other groups


On 8 Feb 2011, at 11:11, Henry Story wrote:

In Monday's teleconf Martin Gaedke pointed out

   gaedke: regarding electronic IDs, there is something going on in Germany
   ... also in other countries ongoing
   <webr3> like the US too 
  <gaedke> http://www.epass.de/
  <gaedke> http://www.personalausweisportal.de/

This started the thread on German Identity Cards
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-webid/2011Feb/0097.html

I added a lot of the links that came up on that thread on wikipedia's page

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_identity_card

which is a bit of a mess at present, and not very well written up. They are still missing a good simple architectural overview of what eID's do. In 2009 the EU came out with "Privacy Features of European eID CardSpecifications"

  http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/it/eid/eid-cards-en

What is worrying is that the German Identity card is RFID enabled. See this video where Chris Piaget queries these cards

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk

Not sure if there is a problem here. The german card has a pin, to protect it.

A lot of the information is either too hight level marketing, or too low level technical. Some questions we need to answer are are:
   - how do these interact with TLS?
   - Is the TLS/Browser interaction the main use case?
      (The linux article shows this nicely [1])
     => if they interact well then it should be a positive for WebID, as it will just
       increase the TLS userbase, and spread eID card readers that could also be useful in a web
       of trust
   - they have signature functionality. When is that used? Via TLS?
   - the german id cards readers seem to have SOAP interfaces to query them. Is this just legacy stuff. 


[1] But is the Belgian eID scheme the same as the german one?   
    http://nauseamedialis.org/belgian_eid_archlinux
    My guess is that given the ubiquity of the browser, they will all be using TLS

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2011 15:29:34 UTC