Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The US's Trusted Identity system?

The US's trusted identity program is picking up some steam recently. Arstechnica has a short article about it, where the gist of it is that you have certain entities that exists to verify your identity using digital authentication. The example they give is of a person using their cell phone as their ID device to get access to medical records, when it some how gets confirmed through some kind of network.

Obviously there are security issues if the cell phone you carry gets stolen, which probably means that you probably should password it... which ironically is sometimes dealt with when the people with access to your medical profile could simply ask about your medical history to verify who you are. What does this additional layer of "security" add? I have no clue.

One other point of contention is that of having a "single point failure" system, where in fact, you could be locked out of society if the network refuses to verify who you are.

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