4 ms·

Belgium has been doing digital identities for years now, we had our first identity cards with chip and digital signature I think 15 years ago? I frequently use

Belgium has been doing digital identities for years now, we had our first identity cards with chip and digital signature I think 15 years ago? I frequently use it to sign documents and login to some government stuff. So if Belgium, which didn't have a government 3 out of the last 10 years, can do it, surely Switzerland can do it too.

edoceo 6y ago
And Estonia too!
- dijit 6y ago
  and Sweden. But these are largely outsourced to private companies iirc. There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company)
  - Avamander 6y ago
    > There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company) No.
    - dijit 6y ago
      Helpful comment. https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto-idUSL8N1WD5JZ https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto-idUSL8N1WD5J... > Estonia's Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) said in a statement Gemalto had created private key codes for individual cards, leaving the government IDs vulnerable to external cyber attack, rather than embedding it on the card's chip as promised.
      - Avamander 6y ago
        It was helpful, you saw that what you wrote was technically VERY incorrect and without any proof.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    To be more specific than the existing "No" reply, what famously happened is that Estonia's IDs used Infineon-based chips for a period of time with 2048-bit RSA keys and Infineon's RSA implementation mints RSA keys with a peculiar property that, once you know about it, makes breaking them much cheaper than it should be. CVE-2017-15361 - for HN readers it's more likely you were impacted by this defect in a Yubikey. "Much cheaper" here means we might expect criminals to break the RSA key for an individual Estonian ID card for less than a million bucks, whereas by design this ought to be impractical at any plausible price. It doesn't mean your bored teenager can make a fake ID on his laptop on a Friday evening. As a practical matter it seems likely key officials & police could be bribed for less than a million bucks, but forging RSA signatures might still be desirable in some circumstances, and anyway of course the mere possibility of this happening ruins public trust in the scheme. Estonia switched to P-384 keys on the same platform. Unlike choosing random RSA keys (which involve finding large primes) choosing a good P-384 key is trivial so there's no temptation to come up with clever but insecure algorithms to mint keys. What's interesting about this flaw is that it only happens because the keys are minted on the Infineon device you own. But we know Estonia has historically had some weird incidents which are best explained by keys not being minted on device but instead burned into the ID card after being made (and potentially recorded) elsewhere. Estonia's laws establishing these cards are clear that mustn't happen (if it did the government can seamlessly impersonate any ID, including ID issued to citizens, non-citizen residents and diplomatic staff) but evidence suggests it did, at least a few times and at least on some older platforms. Estonia's IDs are all public using a very different scheme to Certificate Transparency, since it assumes you trust the Estonian government to decide which IDs exist - but with similar effect, if anybody is minting bogus IDs there would be a smoking gun in the official public records of Estonia. On the other hand if the government (or a government agency perhaps without wider knowledge) has copies of some or all keys, they would be able to decrypt messages sent to citizens/ residents using the embedded PKI. We would not necessarily have any public evidence that this was happening if indeed it was happening. You should probably be confident in Estonian IDs as proof of someone's identity in the usual course of things, but it may be prudent not to rely on this to keep secrets from the Estonian government or its allies.
rsj_hn 6y ago
It's not an issue of whether it's technically feasible do it, but whether it's feasible to do it with appropriate safeguards that protect privacy and anonymity online while authenticating in a targetted way to those end points that need it.
EnderWT 6y ago
Except Belgium didn't build it. They contracted it out to Zetes. https://peopleid.zetes.com/en/reference/eid-belgium https://peopleid.zetes.com/en/reference/eid-belgium
deleted 6y ago
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edoceo 6y ago

And Estonia too!

dijit 6y ago
and Sweden. But these are largely outsourced to private companies iirc. There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company)
- Avamander 6y ago
  > There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company) No.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Helpful comment. https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto-idUSL8N1WD5JZ https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto-idUSL8N1WD5J... > Estonia's Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) said in a statement Gemalto had created private key codes for individual cards, leaving the government IDs vulnerable to external cyber attack, rather than embedding it on the card's chip as promised.
    - Avamander 6y ago
      It was helpful, you saw that what you wrote was technically VERY incorrect and without any proof.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  To be more specific than the existing "No" reply, what famously happened is that Estonia's IDs used Infineon-based chips for a period of time with 2048-bit RSA keys and Infineon's RSA implementation mints RSA keys with a peculiar property that, once you know about it, makes breaking them much cheaper than it should be. CVE-2017-15361 - for HN readers it's more likely you were impacted by this defect in a Yubikey. "Much cheaper" here means we might expect criminals to break the RSA key for an individual Estonian ID card for less than a million bucks, whereas by design this ought to be impractical at any plausible price. It doesn't mean your bored teenager can make a fake ID on his laptop on a Friday evening. As a practical matter it seems likely key officials & police could be bribed for less than a million bucks, but forging RSA signatures might still be desirable in some circumstances, and anyway of course the mere possibility of this happening ruins public trust in the scheme. Estonia switched to P-384 keys on the same platform. Unlike choosing random RSA keys (which involve finding large primes) choosing a good P-384 key is trivial so there's no temptation to come up with clever but insecure algorithms to mint keys. What's interesting about this flaw is that it only happens because the keys are minted on the Infineon device you own. But we know Estonia has historically had some weird incidents which are best explained by keys not being minted on device but instead burned into the ID card after being made (and potentially recorded) elsewhere. Estonia's laws establishing these cards are clear that mustn't happen (if it did the government can seamlessly impersonate any ID, including ID issued to citizens, non-citizen residents and diplomatic staff) but evidence suggests it did, at least a few times and at least on some older platforms. Estonia's IDs are all public using a very different scheme to Certificate Transparency, since it assumes you trust the Estonian government to decide which IDs exist - but with similar effect, if anybody is minting bogus IDs there would be a smoking gun in the official public records of Estonia. On the other hand if the government (or a government agency perhaps without wider knowledge) has copies of some or all keys, they would be able to decrypt messages sent to citizens/ residents using the embedded PKI. We would not necessarily have any public evidence that this was happening if indeed it was happening. You should probably be confident in Estonian IDs as proof of someone's identity in the usual course of things, but it may be prudent not to rely on this to keep secrets from the Estonian government or its allies.

rsj_hn 6y ago

It's not an issue of whether it's technically feasible do it, but whether it's feasible to do it with appropriate safeguards that protect privacy and anonymity online while authenticating in a targetted way to those end points that need it.

EnderWT 6y ago

Except Belgium didn't build it. They contracted it out to Zetes. https://peopleid.zetes.com/en/reference/eid-belgium https://peopleid.zetes.com/en/reference/eid-belgium

deleted 6y ago

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