A funny thing happened to me today...

[logomancer]

First, some background: I got my first Hokie Passport at Orientation like everyone else. I lost it on the third day of class and never saw it again.

So I got a replacement. Today, as I was walking down Main Street, I noticed it was missing. After combing up and down Main Street, questioning police on the scene, braving the tsunami of middle school children coming out of the Lyric, and so on, I gave up. So I got money and proceeded to the Hokie Passport office to get a new one. When I got there, they said that my passport had been turned in. At first, I thought someone had found it on Main Street and returned it. This was wrong, for my old one was turned in.

And so, after six months, I am reunited with my old Hokie Passport. Funny how things work out.

Comments

[yubbie.livejournal.com]

'sokay, within the next next year you'll be getting another one. We have to reissue them all without SSN's on them, and give everyone new student id's. Employees too, for that matter. And if one of the departments gets off it's but, the new cards wlll have a lot more storage capacity for things like pkcs key storage.

[vt-andros.livejournal.com]

Interesting...how come? I'm not opposed to the idea (I was hoping somebody in the university saw the danger of using SSNs as a default user ID), but it's curious since institutions rarely make changes without a reason. Plus your use of the word "have" implies the use of force, presumably legal.

I assume PKCS is some sort of encryption algorithm. What would it be used to encrypt? The only thing I can possibly think of is encrypting the server-side student data (if I'm correct in assuming that that's where all the passport information is stored). A good idea, if it works.

[yubbie.livejournal.com]

New law about id cards and ssns.

And don't get me started on the joys of using the ssn as an id number from a practical standpoint.

pkcs is public key crypto system. pgp is a pkcs. It can be used for encryption, but also authentication. But the key certificates, to be any good, are too damn big to be typing in, and require some kind of digital storage on your end. Your hokie passport, with your personal certificate, or at the very least, your key to your certificate sitting on the x.509 certificate server, and probably some kind of pin to ensure that it's likely you attached to the id that has the key to the certificate would serve as a dandy legal electronic signature.