Re: Biometric Data not in DOD Certificate [was; Re: Certificateprofile for Biometrics information.]

[Stephen Kent <kent@xxxxxxx>]

Phil,

> I don't think so. I got the idea that it was an on card matching situation
> and that it was X.509 certificates, not attribute certificates to be used.
> But I'm not involved in the work.

I am an advisor to the Executive Director for the DoD PKI and earlier 
this completed an analysis of most aspects of this PKI, the one that 
uses the CAC. I can speak with considerable confidence that this is 
NOT how it is used today.

I am willing to believe that someone who wants to promote the use of 
biometrics might be running some pilot somewhere in which this sort 
of thing is done, storing a template on a card for use in local 
verification, but it is almost certain that the template is not part 
of any cert. The cards have a facility to store data for private 
(i.e., local) application uses such as stored value systems. one 
could store a template in this fashion, using the controls offered by 
the Java applets for managing access to such data, so that only a set 
of authorized readers would be able to get the template.

> For biometrics, I see certificate formats as just another package for
> the data. I certainly don't envision biometrics becoming part of path
> processing for example. And the biometric data components are
> often encrypted or otherwise obscured, the details available only to
> a given vendor. But header information, such as validity information,
> quality or type, are becoming standardized and benefit from being
> signed.

There might be some scenarios in which encrypted template data could 
be carried in a cert and be acceptably protected. The question Russ 
asked is what are those scenarios. We know of lots of bad ideas on 
how to store this data in certs and we don't want to condone that.

Note that when we discussed inclusion of biometric data in a cert in 
the Qualified Certificate RFC, we intentionally limited it to data 
for verification by a human being, e.g., a photograph, not a 
fingerprint, voiceprint, etc.

Steve