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Comment by benregenspan | Hacker News Reader

That part seems to qualify as an unsolved problem. But could anyone have taken the scanned data (or the GIF file) and used it to open a bank account in your friend's name? That seems like the main issue that is genuinely solved by correct implementation of this type of system.

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Already today nobody can open a bank account in my name with just a picture of my passport, as the original would be required. My passport doesn't have any of the "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI", so the question of "what exactly the addition of it solves" remains open.

My national ID card supposedly has some of it, the 17-year olds who want to pass as 18-year olds usually show a doctored gif file of their ID card, with a year of birth one or two years before the actual one; this works in ~98% of the cases.

Actually it does. Biometric passports (and IDs) have a chip which is read via NFC and the information the NFC provides is signed by a CA which is the government that issued the passport. ICAO compiles a database of public keys corresponding to each government (plus countries exchange their public keys via bilateral agreements). Unless somebody is doing purely visual inspection, any time a passport is scanned there's PKI involved to validate if the information is genuine.

None of that applies to my (non-biometric) passport, and we were talking about banks that don't have the passport-reading equipment to begin with.

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