Electronic Identity Cards

Many countries around the world have introduced electronic identity cards with which to authenticate the identity of their citizens.

Estonia 

In Estonia electronic identity (eID) cards are mandatory. Citizens have the option to suspend their cards' electronic functions. The electronic identity card's chips store digital certificates to enable electronic authentication and digital signatures to enable documents to be signed electronically. The chips store the private keys associated with the public keys of the digital certificate and digital signature. The privaye keys are protected by a PIN code. The digital certifcates incorporate the cardholder's name and national identity code.

The Estonian system has been developed in association with the private sector. The digital certicates are generated by the telecommunications industry and the cards are distributed by the banks. The authentication software components are publicly available so that electronic identity cards can be used in different contexts. For example companies can use the eID cards for two factor authentication to access their internal systems.

China 

In China it is intended to issue more than 1.3 billion second-generation resident electronic identity cards based on radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. RFID tags can send and receive data over short distances. As a result, the new ID cards can be read by a reader that is within 20 to 30 centimeters of the card.

Hong Kong 

Hong Kong has introduced its Smart Identity Card. The electronic identity card takes the form of a smart card which is the size of a standard credit card. The card is embedded with an integrated circuit, or a "chip" which has the capacity of storing and processing data. The chip supports the recording, storing and processing of data as well as transmitting data to or receiving data from designated device electronically.

Austria 

Austria has introduced a non obligatory citizen identity card. In Austria e-authentication can be delivered by any device that enables the secure storage of the necessary data and an electronic signature function. This can be a dedicated smart card, a bank credit card, a mobile phone or a USB device. The identity cards use sector specific PINs for use in different e-government applications. This means that there is no common identification across different services.

United Kingdom 

In the United Kingdom the Government intends to introduce identity cards with the introduction of biometric passports. The identity cards will be issued from 2008 onwards. A National Identity Register of adults with biometric scans of faces, irises and all fingerprints will be created. It is not yet known if the identity cards will be available for non-governmental uses, such as two factor authentication to organisations internal computer systems or for two factor authentication for Internet banking transactions.

Centralised e-authentication infrastructures are difficult to build. It is costly and complex to build real time e-authentication databases of 60 million or more citizens. An alternative to this is federated identity. A single username and password enable login to a circle of trust. The different organisations making up the circle of trust rely upon one another to authenticate their respective users.