Tony McLoughlin (Sligo-North Leitrim, Fine Gael)
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182. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection the legislation that was enacted to introduce the public services card; if a radio frequency identification microchip is embedded within the card and, if so, the legislation that was enacted to allow this; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [42940/15]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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Section 263 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 (as amended), provides the legal basis for the issuance and use of the Public Services Card (PSC).

Depending on the variant, a PSC contains one or two secure chips.

All PSCs contain a contact chip, which can exchange information securely with a terminal (and, if the terminal is online, with remote servers), via a reader in which the PSC is inserted. This chip uses cryptographic protocols (using cryptographic keys protected within the secure hardware and by a secure operating system) to allow authentication of the card. It contains a limited amount of data relating to the card and the cardholder. Some of this data is publically available to any terminal capable of reading contact smart cards - broadly, the data that is visible on the face of the card, for example name, PPSN, facial image, card expiration date. Other data is private, for example, nationality and mother’s birth surname. This data is only available to terminals or servers that have been provisioned with secret cryptographic keys in secure hardware by the Department. For security reasons, it is intended to only provide such keys in strictly limited and controlled circumstances associated with the statutory uses of the PSC.

The Free Travel Variant of the PSC also contains a contactless chip, containing high security features, that facilitates free travel for cardholders, using the infrastructure developed by the National Transport Authority (NTA) to support the Leap card. Each of these chips contains a unique identifier, which can only be obtained by a valid Leap reader, primed with a secret key that is stored in a secure chip within the reader. The transmission of the unique identifier between this chip and the Leap reader is encrypted.