"I have concerns with the current architecture and the way it looks at aggregating so much personal information and biometrics in a single place," Fishenden was quoted as saying.

"There are better ways of doing this. Even the biometrics industry says it is better to have biometrics [electronic fingerprints] stored locally."

Ben Shephard, smartcard business development manager with Keycorp, said the smartcards themselves are the best method to retain and store individual biometric information. Keycorp has just finished implementing a smartcard project across the Turkish military.

Ed Elliff, enterprise executive manager for Verisign, said most smartcard applications have used digital credentials to authenticate the user and then open up a backend application - where the security should be well and truly failsafe.

"In that instance if someone manages to crack what is on the smartcard it is extremely unlikely they will get at the data itself," Elliff said.