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Tuesday November 08, 2005

Last bit on Digital Certificates and PKI for the time being...

Yes, I've been on this one for a while I know, I get to talk about something much more interesting in my next entry...

...apologies for the outage, I've been on holiday for a couple of weeks, so just getting back into the swing.

It occurs to me that perhaps the government won't include a digital certificate on the card when it's issued, but they might allow it to store digital certs for the benefit of citizens if they want them. You might be able to buy a cert, making your ID card much more useful for CNP (Card not present) transactions and online stuff. Might make sense, though I think it might not help the 'digital divide'.

On the other hand, if the government does bite off the whole PKI thing, with that kind of access to public keys floating around the network, how long will a digital certificate last? With current compute power accessible (and stuff like seti@home) showing that PCs can be linked to work on distributed computational problems, I suspect a digital certificate might start getting a bit flaky at around 3-5 years.

Meaning re-issuance and more cost.

( Nov 08 2005, 01:37:06 PM GMT / Nov 08 2005, 01:37:06 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
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