Here in europe we have several countries with digital ID cards. You put your ID in a smartcard reader, you put in your pin, and you can get your identity verified in a web browser.

Belgium has an identity service based on this. Governmental OAuth. https://www.csam.be/en/about-csam.html | https://iamapps.belgium.be/sma/generalinfo

They publish their own eID reader (middleware) and browser extensions. https://eid.belgium.be/en

Even with an official Linux version. :) https://eid.belgium.be/en/linux-eid-software-installation

In Sweden we have "BankID" that could be card based, but almost everyone has it in their phone. It is issued by the banks (hence the name?) since they already has vetted your identity. BankID is used almost everywhere, from online banking to sign your employment contract or collect benefits when you're home to care for your sick child.

The post office used to issue normal identity cards, but today I only think it's the DMV equivalent and the police that does that.

Wouldn't people just get socially engineered into giving up their code signing certificate? Some ads along the lines of "give us your code signing certificate and be entered into a raffle for an iPhone" would probably work. Stand in line to get some document you'll never use, maybe win a gadget, and a few days later your name is being used to spread malware.

Basically, I don't think a natural person is enough protection against malice. Something like "stick 1 million dollars into escrow, and if someone uses your cert to spread malware, we keep it" is a much stronger incentive. (Not what's done, of course.)

You need to cater for those people, they will be the bulk of your clients and also need the most support. So make resetting it possible but not easy.

Or we could just have a modern ID card that already has a cert embedded in it, and skip the whole go to the post office step. Most big companies and the US Federal government have already figured this out for their own employees.

Keep the post office option for the folks that don't have an ID, but for most people, this would be the most straightforward option.

This does work for certain things, but for some things you don’t just want proof of possession of a particular person’s ID card, you want to see that a particular person matches the document they are presenting in addition to verifying that the doc is real.

I'd have to imagine that's exceptionally rare though. It would be semi-solved with a second factor to unlock the card.