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Comment by sureIy | Hacker News Reader

What certificate are you talking about? The document is your face

"Your face" doesn't tell border officials anything important about you. For that, you need a travel document with relevant biographical information (eg. name, date of birth), along with a picture of your face so they know who to associate that information with. Finally, to ensure that you can't make a fake document that looks like a real document, there's a PKI system where all the information on the document is digitally signed by the country issuing the travel document.

That's far down the line.

The examples in the article just store the document data in national database. In both examples (Finland and Singapore) you register online before the trip and then still show up with your passport.

Singaporeans just show up with their face because their face is already linked to their government ID, stored locally. This can be done by any country after pre-registering your regular passport.

All of this is trivial to implement. There's still no mention of full digital validation.

Well, the thing is -- after doing the whole ICAO PKI into the passport (which already happened) and keeping the trace in the local government database somebody realised there is no point to issue an expensive unforgable paper copy of it, since the digital artifact bundled with it (theoretically) provides stronger security. So instead of issuing ICAO PKI into the paassport, you can just have a dumb app generating a QR code with it or A4 paper extract.

How does that work for identical twins?

The same way as it does now. The face is checked against the identity claim, not against the global lookup, which can't reliably work anyway.

So there's no non-repudiation making it no different than a paper document.

Sorry I can’t really parse the comment, but I do agree it’s no different from a paper document, because why would it?

It's hard to think of any scheme that fully works for that, unless you mandate distinctive body modification like tattoos or scars.

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