ID cards: technical concerns still to be resolved

Fundamental technical and security issues concerning the introduction of a national ID card scheme must be resolved if they are to succeed, industry experts have warned.

Prime Minister Tony Blair this week outlined the government's intentions for ID cards, saying they will instrumental in helping the country deal with crime and immigration in the future.

During a speech at the University of London, Blair talked of the need for a new infrastructure to help with the challenge of law and order in a changing world.

'It means also a wholly new infrastructure to protect our security - through ID cards and the electronic registration of all who enter our country.'

'Once established, this will reduce the costs of crime and illegal immigration and it is a classic example of the modern acceptance that a citizen has duties as well as rights,' he added.

But Dr Mike Rodd, director of external relations at the British Computer Society (BCS), says while the BCS sees the benefits of an independent identity management system, a number of challenges remain.

'There's a lot of really, really fundamental issues involved in this, especially as nobody has really built a big system like this.

'As major IT project, this clearly raises a vast number of issues in terms of appropriate specification and build of the system,' he said.

Rodd highlights the system's independence, its safeguarding, and the underlying technologies used as issues that are yet to be properly resolved.

'Our concern is that a lot of the underlying techniques, like the biometrics systems, while we don't say that they can't work, a lot of them have not been proven in a complex, mass-market environment,' he said.