D3.6: Study on ID Documents

Title: SCOPE AND STRUCTURE OF THE DOCUMENT

Scope and Structure of the Document

This “Study on ID Documents” which has been elaborated in the FIDIS workpackage “High-Tech IDs”, concentrates on the technical perspective of ID documents and focuses on the use of new technologies. Thus, the study covers existing and planned electronic ID documents, also called eID documents, within the EU using technologies for identification of citizen for various purposes. It bases in part on the results of FIDIS Deliverable 4.1 “Structured account and approaches on interoperability” (Backhouse, 2005), especially chapter 9 “case study: eID projects, from capability to use” and Deliverable 3.2 “Study on PKI and Biometrics” (Gasson, Meints, Warwick 2005). Further important aspects being discussed in this chapter are technical standards that are relevant for ID documents.

A special emphasis will be put on the European passport as the European implementation of international Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs). The reasons are: 

1. 1. Within an international context European standards for security and data protection are now a generally accepted base for the use of MRTDs. The implementations of these fundamental aspects have to be ensured by international standards, treaties and corresponding technical and procedural implementations of MRTDs. Very sensitive aspects in this context are the issuing process and the implementation of a procedural and technical access control that ensures the use of personal data on MRTDs by authorised authorities for international agreed purposes only. As monitoring and enforcement of the purpose binding principle especially in an international context is very difficult, the implementation of the data minimisation principle becomes very important. 

   2. The European passport uses technologies and standards that have not been used in this way for international MRTDs to date. 

   3. The international issuing of new MTRDs is a very large project as the concept for MRTDs potentially has to be applicable for the whole global population.  

The European passport uses a number of highly relevant technical standards that have been issued by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). They will be analysed from a technical and procedural (chapter 3) and legal perspective (chapter 4) followed by an analysis of security and privacy aspects (chapter 6).

Basic technologies used for eID documents will be introduced and summarised based on other FIDIS studies in chapter . This study does not cover well established basic technologies of machine readability such as bar codes or optical character recognition (OCR) which have been utilised for more than 25 years (Garfinkel, Rosenberg 2005) and are still used for the machine readable zone (MRZ) on ID documents. Magnetic stripes which are not going to be used future eID documents are also omitted here.

In chapter legal grounds for ID documents throughout Europe are summarised and analysed with respect to the European data protection and privacy framework. In addition current developments concerning a future European legal framework on ID documents are summarised. Chapter starts with an overview on known ID documents in Europe. It continues with the introduction and discussion of five leading and typical concepts of ID documents.

In chapter security and privacy issues of the introduced implementations are presented and examined. This chapter is followed by an overview on economic aspects which are relevant for most of the introduced eID documents. This study concludes with a summary and conclusions in chapter .