The Americans have created the infrastructure for a single global passports

National passports from different countries will soon become as exotic as archaisms like gold coins. It is obvious that in the globalized world of the future, citizens of all countries should have standard electronic passports of a single type. And work in this direction goes.

Recently it became known about the successes achieved by the international non-profit federation Federation for Identity and Cross-Credentialing Systems (FiXs), created with government support from several countries and the participation of commercial companies. This federation announced the creation of the first of its kind global global infrastructure to serve a universal system of passports of a single sample.

Founded in 2004, the FiXs federation has American roots. Members include the US Department of Defense, major Lockheed Martin and EDS government contractors, Wells Fargo Bank, and about 30 other reputable organizations. The task is to develop a unified global system of citizen authentication, so that this system will be recognized by both governments and commercial companies. Nowadays, not only national governments, but also large corporations use their own incompatible identification systems.

Now experts have developed general principles for the operation of such a global authentication system. The main principle is that there should not be a single center for storing information, no common database. Authentication should be done on a distributed basis, as in the OpenID network standard.
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The Federation has already conducted a pilot launch of the new sample authentication system. In addition to the basic principles, the project tested technologies that are supposed to be used for the production of universal ID-cards (passports), including the Common Access Card (CAC) and the Defense Biometric Identity System (DBIDS).

True, the FiXs federation does not think so far to talk about any deadlines when the global infrastructure of single passports is finally operational. The problems are not technical in nature. “The cultural gap between the people as a whole is still too great,” says Mike Mestrovic, president of the FiXs federation. “I think we need to get a general agreement to move in this direction, and I don’t see that this could be possible at least earlier than 2009, or even further.”