Federal ID: The "Real-ID" ?

USAFHokie80 wrote:

Digital signatures and certificates cannot be forged. The ID may physically be copied with all the precision of the original, but the data stored on it cannot be diplicated.

Has been done already. With the new digital passports.

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What are the negatives of having a national ID card (whether or not perfectly counterfeit-proof)?

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

USAFHokie80 wrote:
Digital signatures and certificates cannot be forged. The ID may physically be copied with all the precision of the original, but the data stored on it cannot be diplicated.

Has been done already. With the new digital passports.

"...At present, data held on RFID chips within passports is not encrypted, a factor that would otherwise has frustrated the cloning attack. However the data on the chips is digitally signed, so it wasn't possible for Grunwald to change the data been written onto the blank template without giving the game away. At present, data held on RFID chips within passports is not encrypted, a factor that would otherwise has frustrated the cloning attack. However the data on the chips is digitally signed, so it wasn't possible for Grunwald to change the data been written onto the blank template without giving the game away. ..."

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Advocate wrote:

What are the negatives of having a national ID card (whether or not perfectly counterfeit-proof)?

That sort of depends on what a national ID card entails. In essence, we already have passports and social security cards. So what is the need for another form of federal identification?

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USAFHokie80 wrote:

ebrown_p wrote:
USAFHokie80 wrote:
Digital signatures and certificates cannot be forged. The ID may physically be copied with all the precision of the original, but the data stored on it cannot be diplicated.

You obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Well then by allllll means, explain to me how you can reverse asymmetric encryption. It's not called asymmetric for nothin'

You obviously don't understand what asymmetric means encryption means either then.

Data that is encrypted or signed can be duplicated just fine. This data is just numbers and if you give me a card... I can make a perfect copy of it.

The encryption just keeps you from getting the information... and the signature generates a number that can be checked by all, but only can be generated by someone who knows the secret key.

But copying numbers is very easy to do.

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One of the problems with these data encryption schemes... implemented on a large scale... is that it will be hackable (in one manner or another); but only by people who have the resources and the motivation to do it.

Criminals will find a way around these national IDs just fine. The DVD and RIAA are using similar methods to stop people from copying DVDs... and look at the results.

The only thing these national IDs are good for is data mining for details of the private lives of ordinary citizens-- because any bad guy is going to find a way around them.

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ebrown_p wrote:

USAFHokie80 wrote:
ebrown_p wrote:
USAFHokie80 wrote:
Digital signatures and certificates cannot be forged. The ID may physically be copied with all the precision of the original, but the data stored on it cannot be diplicated.

You obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Well then by allllll means, explain to me how you can reverse asymmetric encryption. It's not called asymmetric for nothin'

You obviously don't understand what asymmetric means encryption means either then.

Data that is encrypted or signed can be duplicated just fine. This data is just numbers and if you give me a card... I can make a perfect copy of it.

The encryption just keeps you from getting the information... and the signature generates a number that can be checked by all, but only can be generated by someone who knows the secret key.

But copying numbers is very easy to do.

Copying data does not a forgery make. The point of the signature is to ensure the integrity of the data. Copying someone else's id would be nearly the same as creating a perfect forgery of a monet, and then signing it with your own name.

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ebrown_p wrote:

One of the problems with these data encryption schemes... implemented on a large scale... is that it will be hackable (in one manner or another); but only by people who have the resources and the motivation to do it.

Criminals will find a way around these national IDs just fine. The DVD and RIAA are using similar methods to stop people from copying DVDs... and look at the results.

The only thing these national IDs are good for is data mining for details of the private lives of ordinary citizens-- because any bad guy is going to find a way around them.

This is what I mean by you not understanding the encryption. The amount of computer power required to attack TDES and PKI would cost several billions in computing power and consume many years and in some cases CENTURIES of time.

Go look up triple DES. Then get back to me.

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Oh, and the encryption for DVD's hardly even compares to what real data encryption is like. Those schemes are weak by any standard. They were not designed to be unbreakable or to secure data for long periods of time.

It would take too much computing power (way more than a dvd player has) to decrypt an 8GB video stream in real time if the encryption was strong. For this card, the amount of data encrypted/decrypted would be small by most standards, maybe a couple of MB at most. You could use 192- or 256-bit encryption on the entire file and have it decrypted in a matter of a few seconds.

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I guess no one can say what the negatives are for having a national ID card.

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USAFHokie80 wrote:

Oh, and the encryption for DVD's hardly even compares to what real data encryption is like. Those schemes are weak by any standard. They were not designed to be unbreakable or to secure data for long periods of time.

It would take too much computing power (way more than a dvd player has) to decrypt an 8GB video stream in real time if the encryption was strong. For this card, the amount of data encrypted/decrypted would be small by most standards, maybe a couple of MB at most. You could use 192- or 256-bit encryption on the entire file and have it decrypted in a matter of a few seconds.

Only a matter of time 'till that's broke too.

Encrypters will not beat decrypters anytime soon, with the exception of things like one-time pads and quantum keys; and those aren't useful for a system which has to undergo mass decryption in order to be useful.

Cycloptichorn

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

USAFHokie80 wrote:
Oh, and the encryption for DVD's hardly even compares to what real data encryption is like. Those schemes are weak by any standard. They were not designed to be unbreakable or to secure data for long periods of time.

It would take too much computing power (way more than a dvd player has) to decrypt an 8GB video stream in real time if the encryption was strong. For this card, the amount of data encrypted/decrypted would be small by most standards, maybe a couple of MB at most. You could use 192- or 256-bit encryption on the entire file and have it decrypted in a matter of a few seconds.

Only a matter of time 'till that's broke too.

Encrypters will not beat decrypters anytime soon, with the exception of things like one-time pads and quantum keys; and those aren't useful for a system which has to undergo mass decryption in order to be useful.

Cycloptichorn

There's no way to "beat" asymmetric encryption. It cannot be reversed. The only way to even have a chance in hell is to have tens of thousands of samples encrypted with the same key. Which will never happen. I suggest you go look up some encryption info ebrown_p

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Factually, I do understand encryption. I am a programmer and use encryption professionally.

Anyone who works in the field knows that to attack these systems... you don't go about breaking the encryption, you go about breaking the infrastructure around the encryption. Plenty of encryption schemes have been broken without actually breaking the encryption.

The larger the beuarocratic enterprise, the more opportunites there are to attack the security. The fact is that these national ID's that will be generated for hundreds of millions of people will have to have a huge infrastructure built to service it.

First of all, the ability to duplicate information is interesting. Your last post is exactly right in that a digital signature can keep you from changing the data. But, copying it... i.e. duplicating an ID is worth something (and very easy to do).

The question, of course, is what information is on the card. If the information reads "ebrown is 5'11" and has blue eyes", then the card will be usable by 5'11" people who buy contacts.

Of course there are more complex information you can put on the card-- retinal scans or DNA... but the problem is the more complex, the more expensive and the more prone to errors (i.e. people being red flagged erroneously)... and of course, the more people who are inconvenienced the more pressure there is to just let people through.

There are plenty of ways to subvert the system... first of all, with 300 million people, is there going to be 1 key... or lots of keys. Of course, if the key gets out, then the whole thing is compromised.

One of the most common ways that industrial spies do this is simple, low-tech bribery. This key will be worth millions... You will probably have multiple keys that change periodically and need to be distributed which provides another infrastructure that a skilled attacker can subvert. If there is one weakness that the engineers overlook (and it is easy to make a mistake in a complex system even if you are a skilled engineer) then the entire system will be compromised.

Another way that hackers get keys through the carelessness of people working in a vast beaurocracy. They can find them on hardware or on diskdrives someone forgets to erase.

Even if you can keep the keys secure.. there are still more ways to subvert the system...

The low level, underpaied employees who create the IDs can be bribed, tricked or can just do a favor for a friend. So a criminal can easily get an ID with fake data on it.

These are only a couple ideas... but the point is there are very profitable, professional businesses that have trouble with security. They have an easier problem-- less users, more money to train employees, and they still have their security compromised.

This is a huge problem-- with 300 million users. They will have trouble dealing with the normal mistakes that will inconvenience normal Americans.

The criminals and the hackers will always find their way around such a large, beaurocratic system.

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USAFHokie80 wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
USAFHokie80 wrote:
Oh, and the encryption for DVD's hardly even compares to what real data encryption is like. Those schemes are weak by any standard. They were not designed to be unbreakable or to secure data for long periods of time.

It would take too much computing power (way more than a dvd player has) to decrypt an 8GB video stream in real time if the encryption was strong. For this card, the amount of data encrypted/decrypted would be small by most standards, maybe a couple of MB at most. You could use 192- or 256-bit encryption on the entire file and have it decrypted in a matter of a few seconds.

Only a matter of time 'till that's broke too.

Encrypters will not beat decrypters anytime soon, with the exception of things like one-time pads and quantum keys; and those aren't useful for a system which has to undergo mass decryption in order to be useful.

Cycloptichorn

There's no way to "beat" asymmetric encryption. It cannot be reversed. The only way to even have a chance in hell is to have tens of thousands of samples encrypted with the same key. Which will never happen. I suggest you go look up some encryption info ebrown_p

Any system which relies upon millions of points of decryption is subject to the failings I describe.

Without a 'reader' these IDs are useless. Unless these readers have major computational power, an asymmetric key is useless. This means that each and every reader will basically have to be a computer, and a secure one at that; so they won't be cheap. And it's still vulnerable to brute force attacks OR a Man in the Middle attack. And we're talking about a system which would have to be robust enough to be used on a daily basis, millions of times. That's the very definition of a system which is vulnerable.

Sorry, but your faith in Cryptology is in this case, misplaced. There is a reason why so many formerly secure keys are now broke; and that's because the hackers have a gigantic advantage over the programmers.

AND we're talking about the US gov't implementing this. So you can throw out any pretensions of technological competence Smile

Cycloptichorn

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I keep thinking of more... (encryption is a field that interests me). We didn't mention a very skilled hacker using a virus to compromise the system.

This attack would be a way to compromise either the machines being used to make the IDs, or the machines being used to read them, and may not even need to touch the encryption.

What if you could trick a number of the ID readers to accept a fake key... that you generated and control?

Several experts have shown that this method could be used to compromise voting machines.

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Let me explain what assymetric encryption means before you both really embarass yourselves. It has nothing to do with the strength of the encryption (Hokie) and current computers can handle it just fine (Cyclo).

With symmetric encryption, if I want to send a message to Cyclo-- I will use a key to encrypt the message and Cyclo will use the same key to decrypt (read) it. The problem with this is that we need to agree on a key before I send the message and we need to make sure no one else sees the key.

With assymetric encryption there are two keys that are mathematically "linked". I will encrypt the message with one key... and Cyclo will read it with the second key. The advantage of this is that we don't need to agree on a key beforehand since having the key to "write" doesn't mean you can read the message. So Cylco can send me the key to write a message without caring that Hokie sees it... since only the person with the "read" key can read the message. The key of a key pair that you give to other people is called a "public" and they other key is the "private" key.

The ID's will use the reverse of this. The message (after it is hashed which is a mathematically trick to shorten it and make the process quicker) is encrypted... but everyone knows the public key... by "reading" the encrypted part of the message with the public key, they can be absolutely sure that the data was created using the private key (which presumably only the government will know).

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

USAFHokie80 wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
USAFHokie80 wrote:
Oh, and the encryption for DVD's hardly even compares to what real data encryption is like. Those schemes are weak by any standard. They were not designed to be unbreakable or to secure data for long periods of time.

It would take too much computing power (way more than a dvd player has) to decrypt an 8GB video stream in real time if the encryption was strong. For this card, the amount of data encrypted/decrypted would be small by most standards, maybe a couple of MB at most. You could use 192- or 256-bit encryption on the entire file and have it decrypted in a matter of a few seconds.

Only a matter of time 'till that's broke too.

Encrypters will not beat decrypters anytime soon, with the exception of things like one-time pads and quantum keys; and those aren't useful for a system which has to undergo mass decryption in order to be useful.

Cycloptichorn

There's no way to "beat" asymmetric encryption. It cannot be reversed. The only way to even have a chance in hell is to have tens of thousands of samples encrypted with the same key. Which will never happen. I suggest you go look up some encryption info ebrown_p

Any system which relies upon millions of points of decryption is subject to the failings I describe.

Without a 'reader' these IDs are useless. Unless these readers have major computational power, an asymmetric key is useless. This means that each and every reader will basically have to be a computer, and a secure one at that; so they won't be cheap. And it's still vulnerable to brute force attacks OR a Man in the Middle attack. And we're talking about a system which would have to be robust enough to be used on a daily basis, millions of times. That's the very definition of a system which is vulnerable.

Sorry, but your faith in Cryptology is in this case, misplaced. There is a reason why so many formerly secure keys are now broke; and that's because the hackers have a gigantic advantage over the programmers.

AND we're talking about the US gov't implementing this. So you can throw out any pretensions of technological competence

Cycloptichorn

It doesn't need secure hardware. Hell, the algorithms are PUBLISHED. They are known to anyone who wants them. That doesn't change the fact that they cannot be reversed. You need an extraodinarily large sample of known text and its encrypted counterpart to even begin to mount an attack. And still, you need a massive amount of computing power and decades to stand any chance to decrypt it.

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ebrown_p wrote:

Let me explain what assymetric encryption means before you both really embarass yourselves. It has nothing to do with the strength of the encryption (Hokie) and current computers can handle it just fine (Cyclo).

With symmetric encryption, if I want to send a message to Cyclo-- I will use a key to encrypt the message and Cyclo will use the same key to decrypt (read) it. The problem with this is that we need to agree on a key before I send the message and we need to make sure no one else sees the key.

With assymetric encryption there are two keys that are mathematically "linked". I will encrypt the message with one key... and Cyclo will read it with the second key. The advantage of this is that we don't need to agree on a key beforehand since having the key to "write" doesn't mean you can read the message. So Cylco can send me the key to write a message without caring that Hokie sees it... since only the person with the "read" key can read the message. The key of a key pair that you give to other people is called a "public" and they other key is the "private" key.

The ID's will use the reverse of this. The message (after it is hashed which is a mathematically trick to shorten it and make the process quicker) is encrypted... but everyone knows the public key... by "reading" the encrypted part of the message with the public key, they can be absolutely sure that the data was created using the private key (which presumably only the government will know).

Thanks, but I understand what asymmetric encryption is - I'm a software engineer as well. I don't think cyclo does though.

I would agree with you that the weakest point will be the people that happen to know the specific key to decrypt it. But, there's really no way around that. That being said... We use encryption now to store highly classified data and so far it hasn't leaked out.

In any case, I don't really see any need for the encryption other than the signature. The data on the ID doesn't really need to be anything more than what is currently on any state issued ID. The only advantage is that it would have a signature and a unique identifier that would allow someone to query a database and get info on the owerner of the ID.

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Quote:

We use encryption now to store highly classified data and so far it hasn't leaked out.

I don't know who "we" are in this sentence. Classified data certainly has leaked out... But this is also a very different problem from the high-security military applications I imagine you are referring to. The problem of a secure system that is touched by everyone in the country (with lots of satelite offices and thousands of employees etc etc) presents very difficult problems indeed.

My objection to the program is that database. I value my privacy and I don't want my government keeping tabs on me. The idea of a "babysitter" government that was discussed earlier in this thread is very troubling to me.

I went down this tangent to make a minor point-- that this system will be subverted by the real criminals anyway. Note I am saying the "system" will be subverted-- not the encryption. A big ugly complex system can be compromised even if the encryption is not.

But the fact it can be subverted by criminals isn't my point. The fact that it will make it easier for anyone with access to this data to "babysit" Americans that bothers me.

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Quote:

Thanks, but I understand what asymmetric encryption is - I'm a software engineer as well. I don't think cyclo does though.

Wrong, you just aren't listening to what I'm saying.

There has to be some sort of system to transmit the private key (stored in the database at a remote location) to the ID reader, which then uses the public key to decrypt it. This transmission - which will occur millions of times daily - opens up the Man in the Middle attack as well as other lines of attack.

There have been many in the past who claimed that their encryption was 'unbreakable,' or so complicated as to be nearly impossible to break. With the exception of the one-time pad, each and every one has been proven wrong. And I have no doubt that the method you propose is breakable as well. It behooves us to consider the history of the subject in question before making bold claims.

Ebrown, I agree that the infrastucture supporting the system is infinitely more vulnerable to attack than the actual code itself; you state:

Quote:

(which presumably only the government will know).

Hell of a presumption, that, considering how hard people will be trying to get this information.

Even if the 'reader' is a full computer, it still won't be cheap - or neccessarily secure. I also believe that the virus angle is a dangerous one, as presumably the computers themselves will be networked in some fashion....

Cycloptichorn

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Federal ID: The "Real-ID" ?

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