October 2006: Governments are increasingly using electronic systems to offer new and more efficient public services. The ability to accurately identify individuals is critical to these services and chip-based documents provide a secure way to do this while maintaining personal privacy.
What is eGovernment?
Covering everything from on-line voting to road traffic management, eGovernment refers to a government’s use of technology to interact with its citizens in order to improve services and streamline operations. Providing secure, electronic storage of an individual's personal data, chip-based identification documents are a cornerstone in many of these electronic interactions.
Probably the most well-known of these documents is the ePassport, which has already been implemented in a number of countries driven by the United States’ Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Now a growing number of other official documents are also going electronic. These include national ID cards, driving licenses, health cards, social security cards, residence permits, visas, site access passes and vehicle registration documents.
Adding secure smart chips into existing documents not only increases system security, it also opens up possibilities for new services. For example, holders of the Austrian ‘eCard’ who opt to upgrade it from a health and social security card to a citizen card can use it to access government services and digitally sign online documents. The Austrian government has such trust in the technology that documents signed this way are as legally binding as traditional, hand-signed documents.
Increasing security
The rapid introduction of ePassports and other electronic ID documents supports the worldwide demand for higher security. Electronic documents are much more difficult to forge. Furthermore, they can store biometric data such as fingerprints, making it almost impossible for people to use stolen documents. However, if electronic ID is to be widely accepted, the smart card technology behind it must itself be extremely secure.
The SmartMX family from NXP Semiconductors sets the standard for biometric passport ICs. Devices in this family have more than enough memory to store the necessary biometric data. In addition, the family includes the first biometric passport ICs to be awarded the highly regarded CC EAL5+ certification.
As Michael Ganzera, eGovernment Marketing Manager at NXP, explains: “We’re bringing our extensive security experience from the banking sector into highly secure eGovernment solutions. Banking traditionally has the highest security requirements in the industry because people have been more worried about losing their money than their ID documents.”
Protecting privacy
Another key factor in the general acceptance of electronic ID is the public's confidence that their privacy is protected. Concerns over privacy vary from region to region. People in Asia are more accustomed to giving out personal details than those in Europe and America. In these latter regions, there have been a number of reports in the more sensationalist areas of the media suggesting that electronic ID is a threat to personal privacy.
However with electronic documents personal data is securely stored on the chip; not printed in plain sight where any unscrupulous eyes can see it. Furthermore, the data can be protected, for example by using trusted PKI algorithms. Hence, smart card chip technology offers much stronger safeguards against identity theft by securing the data on the chip. This is particularly true for the sensitive biometric data, which is only stored in the electronic ID's chip under the control of the rightful owner.
Contactless convenience
At the moment, some 90% of the rolled-out eGovernment applications in the world use contact smart card interface technology based on the ISO 7816 standard. However, contactless systems are much more convenient for the user. They are also more reliable, support longer document lifetimes and can significantly reduce infrastructure maintenance costs.
It’s no surprise then that the industry is going contactless. This move is being driven mainly by ePassports, where a contactless interface is vital because of the ePassport form factor and lifetime requirements. With the number of ePassports issued growing rapidly, many governments have realized that contactless smart chip technology also offers considerable advantages in other applications.
Improving security and convenience at government establishments is one such application. The US government is one of the first to adopt contactless smart card technology for this purpose. It has launched a program to standardize physical access solutions at all government facilities, which has already been rolled-out by organizations such as NASA and the Department of the Interior.
Everyone in the world
The sheer numbers involved make eGovernment solutions hugely interesting to companies in the smart-card value chain. For example, India will require around 150 million electronic driving licenses plus 10 million vehicle registration documents per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese ID card scheme is set to run to some 800 million cards.
To look at it another way, how many other applications have a potential market of over 6.5 billion people? And with the world’s population increasing by almost the population of Germany each year, it’s a rapidly growing market.
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