Other unsolved PKI issue

["Anders Rundgren" <anders.rundgren@telia.com>]

I'm sorry to bring yet another PKI problem to the table:

There is a common belief that physical IDs and electronic IDs
benefit from being put in the same package.

I believe that this have a hampering effect on PKI deployment
as electronic IDs based on PKI, have technically identical
possibilities to their physical counterparts with a number of
exceptions:

- Electronic IDs are practically non-forgable by external forces
  (passport fraud OTOH is almost an "industry")

- Electronic IDs do not suffer from limitations like stamp-sized photos
  (you want a video-clip?  No problems)

There are other problems with physical IDs as well, as they
come in different flavors like public roles ("Dr. John"), to internal
organization badges, to national ID-cards.  To combine a
"Dr. John" badge with an identity certificate seems a little
bit less ideal.

I got the impression that J & J had issued more than a 100K
of certificates in the form of USB tokens.  If this is correct,
this is another indication that the "PKI card" is maybe not
what people (governments included), should be shooting for.

That less than 1% of all computers have card readers but
almost 100% supports USB is another factor to consider.

Anders R