National ID Card and eID in Foreign Countries 2/3

By Yusuke Koizumi, Chief Fellow

 National ID card is used for two major purposes. One is as usual “physical” identification card to identify the holder face to face, and the other is as “electronic” identification card to be used online.

 The latter is called normally as “eID”, the function of which is realized by the electronic certificate of PKI（Public Key Infrastructure）installed on the IC chip of the card. eID is considered as key factor to provide people with efficient and convenient service because it can be widely used for a variety of government services or public services online.

 One of the famous examples of the use of eID of national ID card is the case in Estonia. National ID card of Estonia is, same as in Japan, installed with PKI electronic certificate on the IC chip of the card. This electronic ID function of national ID card can be used as electronic ticket for public transportation (e.g. one-week ticket), driver’s license and health insurance card. It is also used for logging in to the government portal website for citizens, online banking and electronic voting. As a consequence more than 95% of bank transaction and individual declaration on income tax is made online and the percentage of electronic voting in the national election is over 30%. It is to be noted that citizens in Estonia are legally obliged to obtain ID card when they are at the age of 15, and this also encourage the usage of electronic ID.

 There are many countries where citizens are authorized to access to their own data possessed by the public administration such as tax payment information and national pension information. Lately there are increased number of countries such as Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Taiwan where people can browse and check up their Personal Health Records online.

 There has been the problem of utilizing the function of electronic ID card without card-reader. But, in order to solve this problem, there are recently trials to install electronic certificate of public PKI to mobile phones in addition to the ID card in Estonia, Austria and Finland, and there are also different trials to enable electronic certificate of public PKI installed in hard disc of personal computer or USB memory in Korea and Sweden (as Bank ID) and in Denmark (as NEM ID). Furthermore, in Estonia they sold during certain period of time a standard model of personal computer with card reader, and also made efforts to equip PC terminals with card readers at local government offices and banks which can be accessed by everybody.

 Electronic certificate installed on the IC chip of ID card is not the only eID means. There are increased number of countries where the electronic ID means are prepared separately from national ID cards from the point of convenience of use.

 In addition to the cases as explained above where electronic certificate is installed on SIM card of mobile phone or USB memory, there are other means such as simply using ID number and password as electronic ID (eID) and using biometric information of finger print or facial characteristics as the means for electronic ID. In these countries it seems that the priority is placed on convenience of use rather than on security.

 In the next article I would like to introduce these cases more.