5 ms·

at least the Dutch sites work. try a post communist country gov site and you'll start appreciating it right away.

by minusf 7y ago

mcv 7y ago
I don't doubt there are countries that are worse at it, but "the Dutch sites work" is not always true, or sometimes true for questionable definitions of "work". I mean, we've got this nice secure login system for government sites: DigiD, which works fine. So you need that to submit your taxes. A few years ago, it turned out you needed any valid DigiD to submit your taxes, not necessarily your own. There are tons of other sites that cost many millions, and resulted in an atrocious user experience. And some projects simply failed after going way over budget.
- Avamander 7y ago
  I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The two solutions somehow seem very related.
  - mcv 7y ago
    Possibly. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because I haven't heard of any problems with DigiD itself, but you could certainly question whether that benefit is deserved here. But my point is that even if DigiD is secure, that's still not going to help you when the tax service uses it incorrectly.
  - skeletal88 7y ago
    Can you explain why Smart-ID is bad? It is terrible compared to what, PKI, our ID card, the mobile-id system? What kind of bullshit does it do? I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as well.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      > What kind of bullshit does it do? It doesn't utilize a hardware-backed secure secret storage on Android (~80% of marketshare in EE if I remember correctly). This means vital key material is unsafe from any compromise, just a plain file somewhere. This means that they have to go into a lot of effort to detect clones, which is also certainly not infallible. Cloning or compromising an ID-card of Mobile-ID is way way harder with it's audited security. The technical overview describes how key is generated on the device and half of it is sent to AS SK's servers. There's no security benefit in that (they can't really verify you've deleted their half of the key from your device), except that now AS SK has half of your private key. In general their technical overview gives the feeling that like they want to pull wool over people's eyes, it's IMHO a bad sign. It also totally lacks any privacy, every login you do is logged and counted. SK AS shouldn't mandatorily have that metadata. It relies completely on their centralized servers, they go down, your authentication and signing goes totally down. Neither service owners or their clients can do anything about that. Identity mustn't be like that. It's totally proprietary, thus their claims about security can't be easily verified, and it's limited to their blessed OSs (and versions). If they go bankrupt or similar, the identities of all those people are in jeopardy. It's also expensive for server administrators and thus has a high barrier of entry. Identity and security shouldn't be behind a paywall for neither side. The web has LetsEncrypt and now a lot more sites are protected, the web is better off, SK AS has done the opposite. In comparison, ID-card's PKI is usable for free, supported in every system (that can do TLS basically), entirely FOSS if you wish, the hardware is much more secure (EAL6+), it doesn't mandatorily leak metadata, doesn't rely on a centralized proprietary server to work.
Avamander 7y ago
Have you ever used Estonia's?
- Mirioron 7y ago
  If anybody wishes to explore, here's an example: https://www.eesti.ee/en/ https://www.eesti.ee/en/
  - 101404 7y ago
    I like how in "eesti.ee/en/" more than 50% of the letters are "e". So that how I picture an Estonian keyboard now.
- 101404 7y ago
  The EU should just give the keys to the server room to Estonia and let them handle our IT.

at least the Dutch sites work. try a post communist country gov site and you'll start appreciating it right away.

by minusf 7y ago

at least the Dutch sites work. try a post communist country gov site and you'll start appreciating it right away.

mcv 7y ago

I don't doubt there are countries that are worse at it, but "the Dutch sites work" is not always true, or sometimes true for questionable definitions of "work". I mean, we've got this nice secure login system for government sites: DigiD, which works fine. So you need that to submit your taxes. A few years ago, it turned out you needed any valid DigiD to submit your taxes, not necessarily your own. There are tons of other sites that cost many millions, and resulted in an atrocious user experience. And some projects simply failed after going way over budget.

Avamander 7y ago
I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The two solutions somehow seem very related.
- mcv 7y ago
  Possibly. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because I haven't heard of any problems with DigiD itself, but you could certainly question whether that benefit is deserved here. But my point is that even if DigiD is secure, that's still not going to help you when the tax service uses it incorrectly.
- skeletal88 7y ago
  Can you explain why Smart-ID is bad? It is terrible compared to what, PKI, our ID card, the mobile-id system? What kind of bullshit does it do? I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as well.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    > What kind of bullshit does it do? It doesn't utilize a hardware-backed secure secret storage on Android (~80% of marketshare in EE if I remember correctly). This means vital key material is unsafe from any compromise, just a plain file somewhere. This means that they have to go into a lot of effort to detect clones, which is also certainly not infallible. Cloning or compromising an ID-card of Mobile-ID is way way harder with it's audited security. The technical overview describes how key is generated on the device and half of it is sent to AS SK's servers. There's no security benefit in that (they can't really verify you've deleted their half of the key from your device), except that now AS SK has half of your private key. In general their technical overview gives the feeling that like they want to pull wool over people's eyes, it's IMHO a bad sign. It also totally lacks any privacy, every login you do is logged and counted. SK AS shouldn't mandatorily have that metadata. It relies completely on their centralized servers, they go down, your authentication and signing goes totally down. Neither service owners or their clients can do anything about that. Identity mustn't be like that. It's totally proprietary, thus their claims about security can't be easily verified, and it's limited to their blessed OSs (and versions). If they go bankrupt or similar, the identities of all those people are in jeopardy. It's also expensive for server administrators and thus has a high barrier of entry. Identity and security shouldn't be behind a paywall for neither side. The web has LetsEncrypt and now a lot more sites are protected, the web is better off, SK AS has done the opposite. In comparison, ID-card's PKI is usable for free, supported in every system (that can do TLS basically), entirely FOSS if you wish, the hardware is much more secure (EAL6+), it doesn't mandatorily leak metadata, doesn't rely on a centralized proprietary server to work.

Avamander 7y ago

Have you ever used Estonia's?

Mirioron 7y ago
If anybody wishes to explore, here's an example: https://www.eesti.ee/en/ https://www.eesti.ee/en/
- 101404 7y ago
  I like how in "eesti.ee/en/" more than 50% of the letters are "e". So that how I picture an Estonian keyboard now.
101404 7y ago
The EU should just give the keys to the server room to Estonia and let them handle our IT.