PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Flights at risk as pilots refuse to accept 'demeaning' ID cards
Old 17th Feb 2009, 09:28
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Jofm5
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Quant..

Nice vids.. But misguided.

God I am sounding like a proponent of ID cards of which I am not.

I would say from an aviation point of view it makes sense. Make the security as tight as possible, by that I dont mean strip you down to your underwear before boarding flights - I mean check you are you before letting you at the controls.

This would be as you go through to board - dont flash your ID, swipe it and press your thumb against a scanner and off you go - no harm done. There is no need for personal details stored, just a checksum of your fingerprint along with who it belongs to on the RFID chip. This does not even have to be on a central database just on the chip. Although it would be even more secure if they could match that to expected crew on a flight.

Look at how the Biometrics works on passports, the passport office does not interrogate a central database when checking. They check the checksum of your fingerprint against that of whats on the passport - very simple.


A simple explanation of the checksum is that the unique imprint of your fingerprint is calculated to a 256bit value, the machine that checks your fingerprint see's if it calculates the same value. Its not personal other than that value is unique to you. There is no reason for any agency to make not of that value and flag it up as a warning unless you have previously done wrong - so its in essence anonymous until you have misbehaved.

To reduce possible errors different algorithms will be used to cross verify this. This is all essentially the same way your PC will check to see if the files you are accessing are intact or not - its all old technology put to a new use.
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