Although the Supreme Court has indefinitely extended deadline for Aadhaar linking, new applicants for Bank Accounts, Tatkal passports, mutual funds and telecom services will have to provide Aadhaar, according to Ajay Bhushan Pandey, chief executive officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
In an interview Pandey stated that some reports are stating that Aadhaar is not required for essential services like bank accounts and mutual funds, etc., but these are not totally accurate and correct.
There are two types of cases- the existing customers and the new customers. For the existing ones, the date has been extended, but for the new ones, such as opening of new accounts, etc., Aadhaar is required.
Speaking on the level of encryption that UIDAI has, Pandey said that the current encryption was of 2018 bits. While, in a digital signature one has 256 bits, so the Aadhaar encryption is 8 times stronger than that.
He also said that if someone tried to break this encryption, the fastest computer on the planet will need more than the age of the universe to do it.
Speaking on the subject of reviewing encryption, he said that there are two committees in place. First is the UIDAI technology and architecture review committee with outside experts including scientists and professors from IIT’s and IIS and the NCS.
The second committee is a security review committee which includes directors of IIT’s and Defence experts.
He said that security is a continuous process and strong counter measures were required to protect the data and information.
Talking about the front-end operators for Aadhaar he said that to begin with, Aadhaar was a voluntary service for enrolment and other services, thus there was little premium for data theft and manipulations and data leak.
The moment Aadhaar became mandatory some front-end operators tried manipulating the data and asking for bribes for a lack of documents and verification, but, he said that they had conducted a strong drive to weed out such cases and elements, and created an atmosphere of trust, reliability and efficiency
