Apparatus, system and method for authenticating personal identity, computer readable medium having personal identity authenticating program recorded thereon method of registering personal identity authenticating information, method of verifying personal identity authenticating information, and recording medium having personal identity authenticating information recorded thereon

摘要

Conventional credit cards are exposed to risks that someone else signs in imitation of the signature of the cardholder or counterfeits the card, which is relatively easy to do. By the disclosed invention, a personal identity authenticating system of extremely high security for payment with an IC card or the like can be built. The registrant/cardholder and the registrar are assigned their specific identifiers and their secret keys and public keys are managed, mapped to the identifiers at the authentication support station (ASS). Personal identity to which the registrar identifier is attached is encrypted with the registrant/cardholder's secret key. In addition, personal identity is embedded as an encrypted digital watermark into image data by means of the registrar's secret key. Both encrypted identity data and watermarked image data are recorded on the IC card. When personal identity authentication is required, the encrypted identity data with the registrar identifier is decrypted with the cardholder's public key which is obtained by requesting the ASS to supply it, according to the cardholder identifier specified with the request. Similarly, the registrar's public key is obtained from the ASS by using the decrypted registrar identifier. By using the thus obtained registrar's public key, the personal identity is also retrieved from the watermarked image data. Eventually, internal authentication is executed by matching between the separately obtained personal identity strings and checking the image data for falsification.