News in Brief

KINEGRAM New Design Flexibility Allows Bees to Fly in Harmony

OVD Kinegram (OVDK), based in Zug, Switzerland and a subsidiary of the KURZ Group, specialises in the design, production and supply of the KINEGRAM® optical security feature for government documents and banknotes.

OVDK has been providing its image technology as a deterrent against counterfeiting and tampering of ID and travel documents for many years and has now introduced a KINEGRAM embedded in polycarbonate with full data protection (FDP), which not only protects the entire personal information and improves the fusion characteristics of the document’s polycarbonate body – but, it says, unlocks new design possibilities.

The FDP approach offers new ways to integrate the document’s security print with the security effects contained in the KINEGRAM. Essentially, a single security feature covers the entire document with protective effects, while an integrated design ensures intuitive, selfexplanatory authentication.

At the recent Connect ID conference in Washington DC (5-6 October), OVDK unveiled an embedded FDP polycarbonate that combined KINEGRAM’s transparent and metallised effects with the background security print that told an easy to interpret story of bees in flight. By tilting the data page left and right, two bees start flying and as they progress their paths cross in the middle. Reversing the rotation of the data page reverses the flight of the bees, which now fly past each other in the opposite direction to return to their starting positions.

KINEGRAM with Full Data Protection (© OVD Kinegram).

Vietnam Unveils Chip-Based ID Cards for Citizens

Driving licences, social insurance, and COVID-19 vaccination certificates are among the documents to be incorporated into the new chip-based ID cards, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security’s police department for administrative management of social order has stated.

The department is working with the Ministry of Transport and Vietnam Social Security with the move, aiming to help the cards replace a series of documents and so limiting the use of paper. This will facilitate the process of administrative procedures and other transactions by citizens as well as strengthen COVID-19 prevention and control.

Under the Law on Citizen Identification ¹, people from 14 years old can obtain an ID card, which is then renewed when they turn 25, 40, and 60. By the end of September, the Ministry of Public Security had issued about 45 million chip-based ID cards, each consisting of a QR code on the front and a machine-readable zone on the back.

Vietnam has been pushing to implement emerging technologies in public services to boost digital transformation. Earlier this year it was reported that Vietnam will need to do more if it wants to become a digital powerhouse as envisioned in the socioeconomic development strategy adopted by the country’s ruling party in February 2021.

A biannual update on Vietnam’s economic performance showed that the country needs to ensure the development of a digitally skilled labour force, the emergence of a dynamic and agile local private sector, and good but secure access to information.

BT and Toshiba to Build World’s First Quantum-Secured Commercial Metro Network

To help counter the growing threat to traditional network security from quantum computing (see IDN April 2021), BT and Toshiba have announced that the two companies will build and trial what they believe is the world’s first commercially available quantum-secured metro network.

The new network will connect sites across London, from Docklands and the City in the east to the M4 Corridor in the west, providing data services secured using quantum key distribution (QKD) and postquantum cryptography (PQC) encryption. The new network will be operated by BT, which will provide a range of quantum-secured services including dedicated high-bandwidth end-to-end encrypted links, delivered over the Optical Spectrum Access Filter Connect (OSA FC) solution for private fibre networks. The QKD links will be provided using a quantum network that includes both core and access components and will be integrated into BT’s existing network-management operations. Toshiba will provide quantum key distribution hardware and key management software.

The pace of progress in quantum computers presents an increasing risk to standard encrypted key exchanges, authentication and digital signatures. Some estimates suggest that quantum computer-enabled security attacks will be possible within five years and likely to occur within 10 years.

Securing encrypted traffic is a pressing problem today, because data that requires long-term security could be at risk of so called ‘store today, crack later’ attacks, in which the key exchange and encrypted traffic are stored now and broken when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is available.

QKD-based security is unique because the key exchange is secure against any computational or mathematical advance and is, therefore, immune to any present or future attacks by quantum computers.

New Survey Reveals Varying Attitudes to AFR Technology

A new survey into ‘Public Attitudes Towards the Use of Automatic Facial Recognition (AFR) Technology in Criminal Justice Systems Around the World’ ² has revealed key differences across the countries surveyed.

AFR technology is based on algorithms that perform a series of functions, including detecting a face, creating a digital representation, or ‘template’ of the face, and comparing this representation against other images to determine the degree of similarity between them.

In Study 1, the research ran focus groups in the UK, Australia and China (countries at different stages of adopting AFR) and in Study 2 they collected data from over 3,000 participants in the UK, Australia and the USA using a questionnaire investigating attitudes towards AFR use in criminal justice systems.

The results showed that although overall participants were aligned in their attitudes and reasoning behind them, there were some key differences across countries. People in the USA were more accepting of tracking citizens, more accepting of private companies’ use of AFR, and less trusting of the police using AFR than people in the UK and Australia. Other results showed that support for the use of AFR depends greatly on what the technology is used for and by whom.

The report recommends that vendors and users do more to explain AFR use, including details around accuracy and data protection. It also recommends that governments should set legal boundaries around the use of AFR in investigative and criminal justice settings.

1 - https://luatsutonghop.com/law-on-citizen-identification-2014/ 

2 - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0258241