Italian Electronic Identity Card - principle and architecture

The plan for "e-Government", and the need to facilitate interactions between citizen and Public Administration, make find in the electronic identity card EIC one of the most important means to access network services in a secure way. There are five inspiring principles: ??security for the complete lifecycle of the card from production of the physical support to initialisation, emission and its use as a service card. Security must be addressed the point of view of both police and citizen; ??network service access to bring Public Administration (at both central and local level) nearer to the citizen; ??interoperability ie compatibility of national network services by use of the same card standard open technological architecture international standard compliance and vendor independence nationwide; ??virtual centralisation for authorisation and logging operations during production and emission processes; ??full independence of local authorities (which release the EIC) to install their local services. 1 Layout and environment The EIC is an hybrid smart card with two different technologies aboard: a 16K microchip and a laser band. Due to the restricted printable area of the card, all data are written without labels. This approach allows a multilingual solution where needed, for example, in the frontier regions such as the Italian/French, Italian/Slovenian and Italian/German borders. On the first side are the name of the authority releasing the card, the personal data of the cardholder (surname, name, place and date of birth, photo and sex), a unique card ID number and the ICAO band. On the other side are the cardholder's address and fiscal code, the card's validity period and the two electronic devices: the chip and the laser band. On the laser band are replicated, in embedded hologram, personal data and images of the citizen's fingerprint (not mandatory) and holograph signature.