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I don't think you could do it in six months, but the good news is you wouldn't need to. Passports already have an x509 certificate in them saying, "we are the g

I don't think you could do it in six months, but the good news is you wouldn't need to. Passports already have an x509 certificate in them saying, "we are the government, and this is Jeff". So the government already know how to do this, they just were trying to give a gift to their buddies in private industry and they got caught and got their hand slapped by the citizens. There's actually nothing new here: digital IDs were already a thing, corruption has always been a thing, and the referendum process worked correctly to remind the politicians who is in charge.

tialaramex 6y ago
> Passports already have an x509 certificate in them saying, "we are the government, and this is Jeff" No they don't but I can see why you might think that. ePassports (the ones with the stylised "chip" image on the cover) do have X.509 certificates baked into them. And ePassports do say "We are the government, and this is Jeff" (if you are Jeff) but that's not what the X.509 certificate says. Each X.509 certificate is one of a relatively small number minted by your government which says "We are the government of country X and this is a public document signing key". Then the passports all contain raw data (such as a photograph and summary information about their subject) with this certificate and a signature over the raw passport data that can be authenticated with the public signing key. So there's an X.509 certificate but it isn't for Jeff, and there's data about Jeff, but it isn't in an X.509 certificate.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  Nifty, where are the specs that explain that? I got as far as the ldif files from ICAO with all the signing keys in then, but couldn't find examples of the part you are talking about.