“The #1 requirement: Resilient in the face of digital identity attacks”

The UK is fast becoming a case-study in the world’s debate on state-of-the-art digital ID. We welcome the attention. But we don’t get cited as the world-class solution. Johannes Ernst writes

I guess if government was on the leading edge rather than the trailing edge of technology innovation, they would design a digital identity system whose #1 requirement was “resilient in the face of digital identity attacks”. When designing a new identity system, one has the luxury of prioritizing requirements in that way, and there is little excuse not to do this in this year 2005.

As Kim Cameron points out when discussing his newly published 6th law, the inevitable side-effect of the increasing importance of digital identities are ever-more sophisticated identity attacks. Identity attacks are a growth business, no question.

Just imagine if a for-profit hacker — or worse, a hostile government or non-state actor — hacked into a digital identity database containing rich identity information about virtually everybody in a country. And unless an identity system is designed to resilient from day one, it is going to happen with a likelihood of 1. The only question is when it is going to happen, and even if we are going to know it once it has happened. Stuff for a Tom Clancy novel?

It occurs to me the UK ID plan is like a state-imposed version of Hailstorm, with its massive central-server single point of failure and its grandiose ambitions to create a monopolistic chargeable authentication service. But when Microsoft comes up with an ill-conceived plan, it’s able to work it out that it’s doomed and drops the idea. A government isn’t as responsive and may take far longer to see sense.

Published by William Heath on 22/01/05 at 5:27pm

Comments

  1. Do Kim Cameron’s “Laws of Identity” actually have any relevance for the UK Government’s compulsory National Identity Register scheme ?

    This is so reliant on Multiple Biometric Identifiers, and seems to have rejected any kind of Public Key Infrastructure Digital Certificates etc. which might actually be of some use to the individual in online internet or mobile phone transactions for Government or Commercial services ? It seems to break so many of the “Laws of Identity” e.g. the number of Government agencies that can access your National Identity Register data by law, without your permission or informed consent.

    Unlike Microsoft’s Hailstorm or Passport etc. the requirements for the UK’s National Identity Register are to keep a citizen’s personal Biometric Identifiers *secure* for possibly *at least the next 100 years*, not just for the next financial quarter, or even the lifetime of a digital certificate, or plastic smart card or 3 generations of computer software or hardware products.

    Remember that biometrics are the password you can never revoke or re-issue (short of major surgery) even when the system has been compromised.

    Despite a few hints, Kim Cameron has not yet got around to the vast number of privacy and security issues that the centralised audit trail implies.

    Even if all the ID enrolment and subsequent online checks are perfectly secure and encrypted, the pattern of usage as revealed in the centralised audit trail, and , also in part at least, in all the log files of all the devices and systems which make up the IT infrastrucure, can easily reveal sensitive personal data e.g. apparent visits to specialised medical clinics, which imply possible diseases or medical conditions, even though no actual medical records are meant to be stored on the system, periods of residence “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”, which would reveal incaceration in prison or in a mental hospital, even though criminal records are not supposed to be stored on the NIR etc. etc.

    As with any system which is intended to protect things at different levels of security, you have to make sure that the highest level of security or privacy is not compromised by access at a lower level.

    How do you know, at the age of 16, whether you are likely to be recruited to be an MI6 secret agent, or a member of the SAS special forces, or a Police undercover detective etc. in the years to come ? Issuing a Passport in a fake name for 007 is possible under the Identity Cards Bill due to the deliberate attempt by the Government not to have a legal duty to correct inaccurate data on the system, but how will this actually protect the identities of secret agents, special forces soldiers, people in witness protection schemes etc. when they have had their real identities betrayed by using their Biometric Passports or ID Cards when crossing foreign borders e.g. when on holiday *before* they were recruited into their sensitive jobs, is a bit of a mystery.

    Reply by Watching Them, Watching Us  on  01/23/05  at  2:25 pm

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