Government identification cards

Written on August 25, 2015

One of the IT security efforts that the GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES ;) has been really pushing recently is the use of smartcards. I had to go to an office and get my picture taken and the entire surface of both hands printed when I got my PIV Card (basically a smartcard with some identity objects: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/piv/standards.html).

Turns out you can install the pkcs15-tool package, run pkcs15-tool -D on a US Government PIV Card and see some data:

Data object 'Cardholder Fingerprints'
    applicationName: Cardholder Fingerprints
    applicationOID:  2.16.840.1.101.3.7.2.96.16
    Path:            6010
    Auth ID:         01
Data object 'Printed Information'
    applicationName: Printed Information
    applicationOID:  2.16.840.1.101.3.7.2.48.1
    Path:            3001
    Auth ID:         01
Data object 'Cardholder Facial Image'
    applicationName: Cardholder Facial Image
    applicationOID:  2.16.840.1.101.3.7.2.96.48
    Path:            6030
    Auth ID:         01

And this interesting bit:

Data object 'Cardholder Iris Image'
    applicationName: Cardholder Iris Image
    applicationOID:  2.16.840.1.101.3.7.2.16.21
    Path:            1015
Data object read failed: File not found

Good thing it’s empty - I don’t remember giving that to them. Creepy.