> Apple Reference Image is not an id system
GP does not have it all wrong. A company desiring you to prove your identity often asks for a photograph of your government ID. Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
That the Apple Reference Image itself is not traceable to the device/user is beside the point in this use case.
The image will be authentic, but an authentic image of a fake id isn't useful to them.
Also--only two iPhone models support this technology. It'll be years before the DMV or whoever could count on enough adoption before they could support it.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
Interfacing with images is easy. Interfacing with NFC takes work. I have experienced precisely zero identity-verification workflows which NFC'd anything, and that includes my banks, which could easily ask for my debit card's NFC but don't.
I think processing that information is mandatory now, but probably was optional/largely unimplemented in 2012. But maybe I'm off by five years or so?
The CA public key I just got off my country’s website, they were kind enough to just publish it :)
If anything, verifying NFC is easier than images. Asking the chip in my identity card to provide a cryptographically-signed "This document belongs to Jane Doe" request is a handful of lines of code. Doing the same with images? Good luck coming up with an approach which isn't fooled by a photocopy!
Our national app for logging into government sites and confirming things also requires a step where the ID’s NFC is read to reach the highest trust level.
So it’s definitely becoming more and more common here.
The phone is just a relay to a remote server here, as newer ICAO machine readable travel documents intentionally don't support signatures/non-repudiation anymore, so you have to run the entire exchange against a component you trust (i.e. your server, not so much your app on a rooted/manipulated phone).