The problem is self-signed certificates.

A CA is not a great solution:

Using a Certification Authority (CA) could solve the attack but at the same time introduces a new set of attack vectors:

1. The CA becomes a single point of failure. It becomes the juicy/high-value target for the attacker. Single point of failures are not good. Attractive targets are not good.

   Any person with access to the CA key can undetectably fake passports. Direct attacks, virus, misplacing the key by accident (the UK government is good at this!) or bribery are just a few ways of getting the CA key.

2. The single CA would need to be trusted by all governments. This is not practical as this means that passports would no longer be a national matter.

3. Multiple CA's would not work either. Any country could use its own CA to create a valid passport of any other country. Read this sentence again: Country A can create a passport data set of Country B and sign it with Country A's CA key. The terminal will validate and display the information as data from Country B.This option also multiplies the number of 'juicy' targets. It makes it also more likely for a CA key to leak.

   Revocation lists for certificates only work when a leak/loss is detected. In most cases it will not be detected.

So what's the solution? We know that humans are good at Border Control. In the end they protected us well for the last 120 years. We also know that humans are good at pattern matching and image recognition. Humans also do an excellent job 'assessing' the person and not just the passport. Take the human part away and passport security falls apart.

Rather than thinking about IDS as a piece of device/software that provides fancy features. Let me try to summarize some assertions about IDS: 

IDS can capture tons of intrusion events, there is so much of don't care events it is difficult to single out event such as zero day event in the midst of such noise.

It requires tremendous effort to sift through the log and derive meaningful actions out of the log entries.

IDS needs a dedicated administrator to manage. An administrator who won't get bored of looking at all the packets and patterns, a truly boring job for a security engineer. Probably this job would interest a geekier person and geeks tend to their own interesting research!

There are companies that do without IDS, and they do just fine. I agree with Alan's assessment that IDS is like a Checkbox in most cases.  Business can run without IDS just fine, why invest in such a technology?

Firewalls and other devices have built in features of IDS, so why invest in a separate product.

IDS is like Vitamins, nice to have, not having won't kill you in most cases. Customers are willing to pay for Pain Killers because they have to address their pain right away. For Vitamins, they can wait. Stop and think for moment, without Anti-virus product, businesses can't run for few days. But, without IDS, most businesses can run just fine and I base it out of my own experience.

Probably, I would have offended folks from the IDS camp. I have a good friend who is a founder of an IDS company, I am sure he will react differently if he reads my narratives about IDS.  Once businesses start realizing that IDS is a Checkbox, they will scale down their investments in this area. In the current economic climate, financial institutions are not doing well. Financial institutions are big customers in terms of security products, with the current scenario of financial meltdown, they would scale down heavily on their spending on Vitamins.

Running IDS software on VMware sounds fancy.  Technology does not matter unless you can address real world pain and prove the utilitarian value of such a technology. I am really surprised that IDS continues to exist. Proof of existence does not forebode great future. Running IDS on VMware does not make it any more utilitarian. I see a bleak future for IDS.