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No digital identity, no digital Britain

30th January 2009by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

[Dave Birch] I haven't had time to read the Carter report on Digital Britain yet, but I will try and catch up with it sometime soon. I've had a quick look at a few bullet points and not seen anything particularly interesting. There's been plenty of comment from sources that I pay attention too, though.

The long awaited (and somewhat delayed) Digital Britain interim report has been released, and, like the Gowers Report on intellectual property before it, this one seems way too "balanced" for its own good… For example, it says that the country should have universal broadband (of at least 2 Mbps), but doesn't explain how. It just offers up some vague statements about hoping that private sector ISPs reach that goal, and urging the BBC to promote the wonders of broadband to those who haven't signed up yet… The same sort of vague uselessness is found in the part on copyright and file sharing.
[From Digital Britain Report: Blank Promises, Vague Statements And Everything Is Hedged… | Techdirt]

It's hard for the people putting these sorts of reports together to take any real stance on issues, I'm sure, because they have to obtain some consensus. But perhaps some more real vision is needed at times like these, and that necessarily will mean that some sectors of industry will have to accept change. Because our customers are more interested in the transactional side of things, I'm always looking to see how the plans of the great and good will stimulate new business and what the impact on industry might be. Unfortunately, the early comments that I've been reading are not promising: apparently, one of Carter's suggestions is to impose a tax on broadband access and give the money to industries that have failed to adopt new business models in response to technological change. At first, I assumed he must be talking about sheep farmers, because the law dating back to 1572 requiring everyone to wear wool hats on Sunday isn't being properly enforced any more, but it turns out that he was talking about pop stars and record companies.

Carter appears to ask traditional industries to look to new business models, but offer them a subsidy at everyone else's expense if they can't find any. What's more, the voice of those industries is given disproportionate weight. Now, while it is generally true that at the dawn of new businesses this must always be true — since the new businesses that might grow up around broadband don't yet have a voice to be heard — that's no reason no to extend the range of voices to be heard. As the Open Rights Group say,

We are looking at the report in detail, but we are extremely concerned that the voice of consumers and citizens is being marginalised.
[From The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » Digital Britain: leaving consumers out of the picture]

Indeed. Not only will citizens be marginalised, they will also be penalised.

Under the proposed scheme, the government would legislate a "Code on unlawful file-sharing" that ISPs would have to follow.
[From "Digital Britain" to legislate graduated response for ISPs – Ars Technica]

Why telephone companies aren't required to follow a "Code on unlawful bank robbery" that requires them to monitor telephone conversations and report the planning of bank robberies to the police, I don't know, but what I do know is that fining kids and kicking their parents off the Internet is not the way to build a healthy and prosperous 21st century business.

Continue reading “No digital identity, no digital Britain”

Help or hinder?

23rd January 2009by Consult Hyperion3 Comments

[Dave Birch] I've been spending a lot of time on biometrics recently, trying to work out the best way for our customers to exploit some advances in the technology. In particular, especially given the ICO's recent "Privacy by Design" report, I've been trying to think of ways to make biometric authentication support identification in a reasonable business model that allows for appropriate privacy settings. One of the reasons why this is complicated is that the temptation to use biometrics for identification purposes is very strong.

Biometric authentication has a role in maintaining and defending our control of our own identity and personal data. This emerging technology makes it virtually impossible to assume someone else's unique identity.
[From Understanding anonymity and the need for biometrics | The Industry Standard]

But biometric authentication of what? If it is biometric authentication of a single, unvarying, "full disclosure" identity (eg, a national ID card of some description) then it's hard to justify the architecture. In other words, why bother with authenticating people against some identity token when you can just match them to their identity in some sort of database: instead of showing the supermarket an ID card to prove you are old enough to buy cigarettes, why not have the supermarket send your fingerprints off to a database and have the database tell the supermarket how old you are? There's no need for card. Or is there?

We have to expect that people will see us when we are in public and that our open public acts will be just that. But we have to worry that, in an anonymous world without authenticated identity, privacy will be violated when others can assume our identifying characteristics and take control of transactions and interactions outside the home that are indeed personal and unique to us.
[From Understanding anonymity and the need for biometrics | The Industry Standard]

With the right identification and authentication architecture, the card provides a means to prove authentication without necessarily disclosing identification. Thus, my ID card can tell you that I am its rightful owner (by matching my, say, fingerprint with an on-card template) and that I am 18. But there is no reason for it to tell you who I am.

Continue reading “Help or hinder?”

Pieces of eight bits to the byte

14th January 2009by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

[Dave Birch] There’s apparently another SEPA out there. It’s the Somali-Ethiopian Payments Area. I see that they appear to have launched a new cross-border high-value payment scheme with real-time settlement. Sort of like Western Union, but with a minimum transaction value of $3 million and no pesky anti-money launder or know-your-customer stuff to get in the way.

Continue reading “Pieces of eight bits to the byte”

Business and ID cards

7th January 2009by Consult Hyperion12 Comments

[Dave Birch] Just a quick reminder about the Digital Identity Forum’s joint seminar with EEMA at the British Computer Society in London on January 29th. This seminar, sponsored by Consult Hyperion, will be looking at the business opportunities that might arise from the introduction of the UK national identity card. You can register for the seminar at the EEMA web site. The event will be chaired by John Elliott of Consult Hyperion, who has considerable international experience of designing national ID card schemes. With speakers and panelists including

Meg Hillier, the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Identity.
Martin Linda, Siemens PLC.
Frank Layman, Federal Civil Service Information and Communication Technology department, Belgium.
Andy Smith, Identity and Passport Service.
David Blanco, Tractis, Spain.
Colin Whittaker, APACS.
Me.

it should be a useful day out and will hopefully lead to some genuine innovation. Whatever your opinions about ID cards — and I’ve made mine plain — the fact is that the first ones have already been issued. Since the UK scheme is now here, it makes sense for business to look at the opportunities that have arisen around ID cards in other markets, for both online and offline use, in the public and private sectors.

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It’s always, always the same

22nd December 2008by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] One of the reasons why a digital identity infrastructure ought to be more than just building a big database of everyone and then letting everyone have access to it is that the infrastructure will inevitably be abused by those on the inside, no matter how much effort goes into keeping out the bad guys on the outside.

Missouri Citibank employee Brandon Wyatt… accused of tapping Citibank's computers for customer information, then using it to set up checking accounts online with competing banks, including Bank of America, Washington Mutual and AmTrust. Wyatt allegedly wire transferred customer funds from Citibank to the new accounts, then cashed them out with additional transfers, checks, debit card purchases and ATM withdrawals. His take, according to federal prosecutors in St. Louis, was at least $380,000.
[From Fed Blotter: Citibank Worker Allegedly Plunders Customer Accounts | Threat Level from Wired.com]

It's hard to see how you can stop this from happening completely in an economic way, but what you can do is make sure that there is an audit trail so that someone how decides to have a go at this kind of fraud has a reasonable expectation of being caught. Although I have to say that armed bank robbers have a reasonable expectation of being caught (and a reasonable expectation of a long sentence if they are caught) but they still do it. Anyway, my point is that if you take people personal data and put it in a honeypot, there is only one outcome. A database is not an infrastructure.

Continue reading “It’s always, always the same”

That’ll do nicely

19th December 2008by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] Some time ago, I pointed out that aggressive retailers might use ID cards to cut payment schemes out of the transaction loop, by using ID cards as payment tokens and using the ACH network rather than Visa or MasterCard and I subsequently wrote a piece on this for Electronic Finance & Payments Law & Policy. Having been thinking about this and other implications of the introduction of a national ID card scheme, I was surprised to hear from a bank that I was talking to that they had no strategy on the UK ID card (despite the fact that the first cards have already been issued) and no plans to develop a strategy. Now, on the one hand this is understandable, since the UK cards don't do much and there are no readers for them anyway, but on the other hand it may be unwise if other people are developing strategies that may impact banking.

As I have long been advising our clients in the payment space, there will be inevitable implications for retail payments businesses once a national ID card is in place.
[From Digital Identity Forum: Paying for identity]

Retailers want business change, not just lower fees, and has been discussed over on Digital Money, retailers may well be the key stakeholder group when it comes to developing new payment schemes for use at retail POS. Now, a barrier to their competing with existing card schemes themselves has been the cost of issuing and managing secure smart cards or other tokens. But if the government is going to do it for them, then they may as well exploit it. I can easily imagine taking my ID card and a blank cheque down to Tesco, putting them both into a machine and punching in my PIN. Then, next time I go shopping, I punch my PIN into the keypad at the checkout lane, wave my ID card over a reader and then go on my way. This kind of the service has already begun to spring up in the U.S.A., in response to the issuing of “Real ID”drivers’ licences which have machine readable magnetic stripes that can be read at POS terminals. A company called National Payment Card (NPC) has begun to exploit the opportunity, by getting customers to register their bank details and a PIN against their licence. This means that customers can then pay for fuel by swiping their licenses at petrol stations and entering a PIN. A similar national scheme has just launched in Malaysia, where one of the leading banks has begun installing kiosks where customers can use their bank chip card and the MyKad ID card (without biometric authentication) together to link the ID card with the bank account automatically:

Consumers will have to open either a savings or a current account with EON Bank, which is the only bank providing payment transactions through the MyKad at the moment.
[From Buy fuel with your MyKad]

The scheme is targeting the fuel sector in the first instance and has signed up all Caltex and BHP filling stations, so that customers can fill up and they pay at the pump with their ID card. Since the margins on fuel are thin, the sector has every incentive to cut payment schemes out of the loop and move to direct bank transfer via ACH. I wonder if they even bother to authorise the transactions: after all, if you try to cheat them by presenting the ID card when you have no money in the bank, they have your ID details and I imagine you'll be hotlisted pretty quickly.

Continue reading “That’ll do nicely”

Vote “no” to yesterday’s technology

16th December 2008by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] The recent Pew report on the Future of the Internet makes the same point that I have been droning on about for ages. Looking at PCs and the web doesn’t tell you anything about the future, because the future is mobile.

“Clearly, in the long run, mobile wins,” says Consult Hyperion’s Birch. “For most people, in most of the world, most of the time, the mobile phone is the most important device.”
[From FST]

Now, in some advanced countries, it is seen as natural to being to transfer applications that hinge on identity over to the most personal interweb interface, the mobile phone. An interesting case study is Estonia. We’ve looked before at Estonia’s use of new technology and they are back at the forefront this month:

Lawmakers approved a measure Thursday allowing citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections in 2011… The mobile-voting system, which has already been tested, requires that voters obtain free, authorized chips for their phones, said Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which issues personal ID cards in Estonia.
[From Estonia to vote by mobile phone in 2011 – International Herald Tribune]

This is a similar architecture to that being deployed in Turkey, where the key pair at the heart of scheme is stored in the SIM and the on-board application uses it for digital signatures.

Continue reading “Vote “no” to yesterday’s technology”

It was great until the users showed up

1st December 2008by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] An example that I’ve used before to explore what can go wrong with identity management system is the smart card-based “strong” authentication system that has been delivered as part of the National Health Service (NHS) £20 billion Connecting for Health (CfH) scheme.

The poll of more than 300 GPs found that one in six family doctors said they were aware of NHS staff sharing smartcards in their area, and one in 20 GPs admitted they sharing their own smartcard. Reasons given included the time taken to log-on to systems or to access data at multiple terminals, and losing cards or leaving them at home.
[From E-Health Insider Primary Care :: CfH condemns smartcard sharing]

Now, obviously the $20 billion and-still-rising Connecting for Health scheme is hardly representative of the average project with identity management requirements, but it does illustrate what happens when the management consultant-driven top-down politically-architected grand project meets the real world: in the end, something always gives.

A spokesperson for NHS Conecting for Health said the sharing of smarcards was unacecceptable and a serious discplinary offence.
[From E-Health Insider Primary Care :: CfH condemns smartcard sharing]

Whatever.

Continue reading “It was great until the users showed up”

Stoking up the debate on data sharing

23rd September 2008by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

[Dave Birch] At the beginning of the year I proposed Stoke's Law as the back-of-the-envelope law for estimating the amount of new crime enabled by government data collection and sharing:

I propose Stoke's Law, which is that as the amount of data that the government collects grows, so will the number of people who are victims of crimes that were made possible by unauthorised access to government databases.
[From Digital Identity Forum: A new law]

We never really settled on the shape of the Stoke's Law curve, leaving it as a square law (ie, the amount of crime goes up as the square of the amount of data collected) but I'm really beginning to wonder if this is steep enough. This is because, in the U.K. at least, civil servants and management consultants appear obsessed with data sharing, which of course makes the problem much worse. It's no surprise to see stories about the abuse of government databases appearing with apparently increasing frequency. For example, I read only last weekend of a case in which a civil servant was tapping into databases to pass a woman's details on to her violent ex-partner so that he could track her down. This wasn't for money — the civil servant was the new girlfriend of the violent man in question — but could have had a much more serious outcome than the kind of identity crime (ie, credit card fraud) that the government says is a priority with respect to the national ID card scheme.

As someone who believes that cock-up rather than conspiracy is the guiding principle of government IT, I have to say that corrupt civil servants passing on information to criminals is unlikely to be the biggest problem with the joined-up administration imagined by the designers of new public sector infrastructure:

Government records are notoriously inaccurate. If a person is wrongly listed in a database, the problems of that error are now amplified.
[From Concurring Opinions]

When government databases were inaccurate and distinct, the errors were there but it was difficult for them to propagate. Now they will be able to zoom around at the speed of light.

Continue reading “Stoking up the debate on data sharing”

I’m sure banks have a strategy for this kind of thing

18th September 2008by Consult Hyperion3 Comments

[Dave Birch] Some time ago, I pointed out that sensible retailers would use ID cards to cut payment schemes out of the transaction loop, by using ID cards as payment tokens and using the ACH network rather than Visa or MasterCard. I've just written another piece on this for Electronic Finance & Payments Law & Policy.

As I have long been advising our clients in the payment space, there will be inevitable implications for retail payments businesses once a national ID card is in place.
[From Digital Identity Forum: Paying for identity]

Retailers want business change, not just lower fees. Now, a barrier to their competing with existing card schemes themselves has been the cost of issuing and managing secure smart cards or other tokens. But if the government is going to do it for them, then they may as well exploit it. I can easily imagine taking my ID card and a blank cheque down to Tesco, putting them both into a machine and punching in my PIN. Then, next time I go shopping, I punch my PIN into the keypad at the checkout lane, wave my ID card over a reader and then go on my way. This kind of the service has already begun to spring up in the U.S.A., in response to the issuing of “Real ID”drivers’ licences which have machine readable magnetic stripes that can be read at POS terminals. A company called National Payment Card (NPC) has begun to exploit the opportunity, by getting customers to register their bank details and a PIN against their licence. This means that customers can then pay for fuel by swiping their licenses at petrol stations and entering a PIN. A similar national scheme has just launched in Malaysia, where one of the leading banks has begun installing kiosks where customers can use their bank chip card and the MyKad ID card (without biometric authentication) together to link the ID card with the bank account automatically:

Consumers will have to open either a savings or a current account with EON Bank, which is the only bank providing payment transactions through the MyKad at the moment.
[From Buy fuel with your MyKad]

The scheme is targeting the fuel sector in the first instance and has signed up all Caltex and BHP filling stations, so that customers can fill up and they pay at the pump with their ID card. Since the margins on fuel are thin, the sector has every incentive to cut payment schemes out of the loop and move to direct bank transfer via ACH. I wonder if they even bother to authorise the transactions: after all, if you try to cheat them by presenting the ID card when you have no money in the bank, they have your ID details and I imagine you'll be hotlisted pretty quickly.

Continue reading “I’m sure banks have a strategy for this kind of thing”