False Sense of Security for Children and Parents

Verisign announced plans to produce a new USB-token to be issued to children to verify their age and identity. The theory would be that children would adopt the use of these tokens and be able to validate that the people they are chatting with online are actually children and not adult pedophiles claiming to be children. However, as Thomas Greene, author of Computer Security for the Home and Small Office, points out, the USB-token will only know the age and identity of the child it was issued to, not necessarily the person using it. Being a small physical device they will be easily lost or stolen and will almost certainly start an instant black-market to purchase them. The plan sounds good on paper, but the reality is that it would provide a false sense of security to both children and parents while possibly exacerbating the problem it is intended to fix. For more information see Greene's article in The Register: Now We Are 8 (and This Token Proves It).