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EID : Yet Another JVM...

Yet another JVM that will carry in my wallet all the time! As any Belgian citizen has (or will soon), I have received my new Electronic Identity Card (EID). Belgium is the first large-scale deployment of electronic identity card in Europe. But there is little known fact about this deployment, the Belgian EID is based on Java Card technology! It uses an Axalto (formerly known as SchlumbergerSema) CryptoFlex 32K Java Card. So now, even my grandmother will use, in some way, a Java based technology! My EID picture does not look to good; this is due to several factors:

• The various security features used on the EID doesn't look too good when pictured (obviously!): Rainbow & guilloche printing, Changeable Laser Image, Optical Variable Ink, Alpha gram, relief and UV printing, Laser engraving.
• Me! I was rushing to bring my picture and papers to the City Hall before going to a meeting 100Km away. And it is never a good idea considering that I will now have to live with this 'just-out-of-shower' picture for the next 5 years!

Deploying smart cards at a country scale, even for Belgium, is certainly not the easiest task on earth! Considering that the EID concept has been approved by the Belgian Council of Ministers in July 2001 and that the nation-wide roll-out was only started less than a year ago (end September 2004), that the deployment is a complex process that involves national (ex. National Register) and local entities (municipalities); it looks like the EID rollout is going well. Danny De Cock's godot.be monitor the EID deployment; Danny is using CRLs (Certificate Revocation List) to gather information about activated cards, active cards, cards waiting to be activated, revoked cards. And as of yesterday, there were 825.470 active cards, mine excluded. Several Sun products already have some sort of support for the Belgian EID: Solaris 10, SunRay, Java Desktop System, Sun Java System Access Manager. When time permit, I will blog more about some of those, EID daily uses but also EID from a Java point of view. Tags: Belgium EID JavaCard SmartCard Java ( août 01 2005, 08:30:20 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]