7 ms·

An important detail - this was a third party app, NOT an official government one. So, people were essentially uploading their PII to some guy's server and hopin

An important detail - this was a third party app, NOT an official government one. So, people were essentially uploading their PII to some guy's server and hoping for the best. This is what we all feared, and hoped wouldn't happen. But here it is.

dvt 5y ago
> NOT an official government one Not sure how this is an "important detail," as it doesn't even make any difference: governments have a god-awful track record of securing data[1][2]. Any sane infosec professional realizes vaccine passports (or any other "passport" app) is a terrible idea. Heck, Apple has zero-day exploits like every other week. [1] https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-leaks-pii-two-million-disaster-1-1/ https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-leaks-pii-two-... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2020/02/disa-exposes-personal-data-of-200000-defense-employees/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2020/02/disa-exp...
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail? people are replacing those with apps anyway.
  - dvt 5y ago
    > What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail? Yes. A passport is orders of magnitude harder to forge than for some app written by a random government contractor to leak data.
    - nanis 5y ago
      Except that the digital ones allow frequent invalidation as the commercial and bureaucratic power centers collude.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      Europe already has a simple, secure digital vaccine passport. You get a QR code that contains your name, date of birth, and the doses you've received. It's digitally signed by your national government, so that it can't be faked. Nobody needs to hold a centralized database of vaccinated people. Because it's just a QR code, you can store it however you'd like. If you want, you can print it out and carry it around in your pocket. It's easy to check: you just need to read the information and check that it's digitally signed by a trusted authority (both of these can be done by an app), and check the the person listed in the QR code is the person in front of you (e.g., by asking for an ID).
  - 3np 5y ago
    Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography so things can be proven without sharing of the underlying data needed for traditional validation. There has been a lot of progress both in fundamentals and implementations on this front over recent years but even decades old schemes using attestations would have been a huge improvement over “dump and read data through trusted server”. Here’s a trivial one that anyone could implement without using anything new from the past decade: Whoever stands as “trusted party” could have signing certificates distributed to the verifier-side of the app. They sign hashes of the relevant info. All data sharing needed is once per issuance of “vaccination certificate”. No persistence of PII necessary. If you don’t want to have to disclose PII as part of validation, that’s where the fancier schemes come in. If you can’t or won’t spend resources to do it properly then yes, physical card is preferred.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      This is exactly what Europe does. In a sane world, every country would just adopt the same QR-code standard.
      - 3np 5y ago
        It’s still not great from a privacy perspective. Date of birth, names, and granular details on vaccinations are cleartext, among other things. It’s not that terrible compared to what’s out there and falls in the “trivial” category (which is not necessarily a negative; less complexity is good) but it’s far from ideal and it’d have to improve before pushing it globally.
        melolife 5y ago
        The challenge is that the validator sets the rules for who is vaccinated. As an example, some jurisdictions might declare individuals with single doses protected. Another real example: the EU is unwilling to accept Covishield vaccinations, despite it being AstraZeneca/Vaxzevria manufactured in India.
        DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    A verifiable QR-code system where the medium doesn't matter such as the one in Europe. Use a screenshot, print it on paper, doesn't matter.
    - rsync 5y ago
      I can confirm. See my comment upthread about recent trip to Switzerland. I did all of these things (printed, screenshot, pulled up a webpage) and also had a successful scan of a picture of a QR code that I had in my photoreel (which showed the entire printout, of course, with my name, etc. on it).
    - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
      This is how BC does it. You get a QR code which you can either present on your phone or as a print out.
      - fknorangesite 5y ago
        Manitoba as well.
    - EamonnMR 5y ago
      That sounds pretty reasonable, yeah.
  - MadeThisToReply 5y ago
    Not bothering with a movement license (sorry, "vaccine passport") in the first place?
  - syshum 5y ago
    Umm no Vaccine Passport at all... How about that. The amount of tyranny people are willing to accept as a response to this is still baffling to me, it is like this is the first time humanity has ever encountered a communicable illness... This is not the proper way to respond to said illness and does not bode well for the future of individual liberty
- vdqtp3 5y ago
  You didn't even post about the most significant PII loss in USG history - OPM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    No one likes to talk about that one, probably because Russia wasn't involved, and therefore it wouldn't be fashionable to continually harp about it.
- yabones 5y ago
  I'm coming at this from the perspective of Ontario, Canada. eHealth, as cumbersome and obtuse as it is, is unquestionably secure. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. We have the IPC (https://www.ipc.on.ca/ https://www.ipc.on.ca/) and several other checks and balances that must be satisfied before a system can hold health data. Not to mention the federal requirements such as PHIPA. These safety requirements are completely out the door when some guy runs a vaccine app. This leak wasn't a mishandled CVE or a zero-day - it was just lazy and sloppy design. Personally, I'm neutral on the technological aspect of 'passports'. I would prefer a hard-copy if possible to keep tech out of the question entirely, but there are absolutely ways to do it well, or at least good enough. This isn't it - this was an opportunist seizing the disorganization of the Alberta government from what I gather.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    Slight nitpicks, PHIPA is provincial legislation for health information privacy, and you're likely thinking of FIPPA and MFIPPA as federal. A passport is going to be a debacle, and there will be leaks like this one and likely worse. If you happened to look at the clerks screen on their tablet when you got your last shot, the vaccination rollout was done using a salesforce app, and it's very likely it didn't go through the same checks and balances (like a privacy impact assessment) as internal govt apps. IMO, it's got a huge legal problem where it doesn't collect consent in any meaningful way (an anonymous clerk ticks boxes on a screen you can't see, with no way of verifying they have obtained your consent). At least when you sign a physical consent form, you can write-in that you are getting the shot under duress from your employer, but the rollout doesn't track that, and that's by design. The same can be said for public sector employers collecting vaccine certificate information as a condition of employment (have fun with the unions on that one), as they are also subject to PHIPA, and most of them do not have the facilities for PHIPA compliance in the handling of employee health information (PHI). There are so many technical issues with passports that it's going to be a complete discredit to government, but my impression is they don't actually care. This is a putsch to elevate a class of apparatchiks who do not assert their freedoms or rights, and where they are headed, they don't need legitimacy or credibility. There is a generation of people in government and other institutions now who are basically terrible people whose plan is to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube in terms of data, "temporary measures," and passing laws that won't withstand court challenges, and they imagine themselves as being muscular about policy. I'd predict it ends very badly for them, and if not for them, then definitely for the rest of us. One wonders why they think it will work this time.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Yeah, hugely important detail - this post should change title to what the article actually has as it's title: Portpass app may have exposed hundreds of thousands of users' personal data Because it's just fueling misinformation and mistrust of what will eventually be the official apps. C'mon CBC. People stupidly using random third party apps and you're making it out like it's the official government 'should be trustworthy' one when it isn't and is just a random app data leak story.
- HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  Trust me, there is no additional help needed to make large swaths of the population distrustful of the government implementing a digital "papers, please" system in order to participate in human society. And honestly, I think I would trust the government-developed app far less than a private one. Have you SEEN any government website before?
sharken 5y ago
It could have been prevented, just don't require a vaccine passport. I'm hoping that more countries will follow the danish example, where the vaccine passport was dropped on September 10, 2021. This amount of control doesn't make any sense in countries with high percentage of vaccination such as Canada. Another country about to make this mistake is Scotland.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  There's an argument to be made, not that I'm making it, that you need to have vaccine passports in order to get from 80-something % vaccinated to some higher key immunity threshold, since otherwise it's hard to convince the final group of unvaccinated stragglers to get vaccinated.
  - Romanulus 5y ago
    That's an interesting use of the word 'convince' you've made there.
  - syshum 5y ago
    >>it's hard to convince the final group Hmmm that is an odd spelling for coerce, force, threaten...
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      You should look up the definition of those words, they don't apply here.
      - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
        Yeah, banning people from participating in basic society unless they take the medical procedure you want them to is totally not coercion in any way...
        barbazoo 5y ago
908B64B197 5y ago
> this was a third party app, NOT an official government one. Official government software is systematically high quality after all [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Romanulus 5y ago
Basically everything the government develops is third party.

dvt 5y ago

> NOT an official government one Not sure how this is an "important detail," as it doesn't even make any difference: governments have a god-awful track record of securing data[1][2]. Any sane infosec professional realizes vaccine passports (or any other "passport" app) is a terrible idea. Heck, Apple has zero-day exploits like every other week. [1] https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-leaks-pii-two-million-disaster-1-1/ https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-leaks-pii-two-... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2020/02/disa-exposes-personal-data-of-200000-defense-employees/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2020/02/disa-exp...

EamonnMR 5y ago
What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail? people are replacing those with apps anyway.
- dvt 5y ago
  > What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail? Yes. A passport is orders of magnitude harder to forge than for some app written by a random government contractor to leak data.
  - nanis 5y ago
    Except that the digital ones allow frequent invalidation as the commercial and bureaucratic power centers collude.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    Europe already has a simple, secure digital vaccine passport. You get a QR code that contains your name, date of birth, and the doses you've received. It's digitally signed by your national government, so that it can't be faked. Nobody needs to hold a centralized database of vaccinated people. Because it's just a QR code, you can store it however you'd like. If you want, you can print it out and carry it around in your pocket. It's easy to check: you just need to read the information and check that it's digitally signed by a trusted authority (both of these can be done by an app), and check the the person listed in the QR code is the person in front of you (e.g., by asking for an ID).
- 3np 5y ago
  Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography so things can be proven without sharing of the underlying data needed for traditional validation. There has been a lot of progress both in fundamentals and implementations on this front over recent years but even decades old schemes using attestations would have been a huge improvement over “dump and read data through trusted server”. Here’s a trivial one that anyone could implement without using anything new from the past decade: Whoever stands as “trusted party” could have signing certificates distributed to the verifier-side of the app. They sign hashes of the relevant info. All data sharing needed is once per issuance of “vaccination certificate”. No persistence of PII necessary. If you don’t want to have to disclose PII as part of validation, that’s where the fancier schemes come in. If you can’t or won’t spend resources to do it properly then yes, physical card is preferred.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    This is exactly what Europe does. In a sane world, every country would just adopt the same QR-code standard.
    - 3np 5y ago
      It’s still not great from a privacy perspective. Date of birth, names, and granular details on vaccinations are cleartext, among other things. It’s not that terrible compared to what’s out there and falls in the “trivial” category (which is not necessarily a negative; less complexity is good) but it’s far from ideal and it’d have to improve before pushing it globally.
      - melolife 5y ago
        The challenge is that the validator sets the rules for who is vaccinated. As an example, some jurisdictions might declare individuals with single doses protected. Another real example: the EU is unwilling to accept Covishield vaccinations, despite it being AstraZeneca/Vaxzevria manufactured in India.
      - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  A verifiable QR-code system where the medium doesn't matter such as the one in Europe. Use a screenshot, print it on paper, doesn't matter.
  - rsync 5y ago
    I can confirm. See my comment upthread about recent trip to Switzerland. I did all of these things (printed, screenshot, pulled up a webpage) and also had a successful scan of a picture of a QR code that I had in my photoreel (which showed the entire printout, of course, with my name, etc. on it).
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    This is how BC does it. You get a QR code which you can either present on your phone or as a print out.
    - fknorangesite 5y ago
      Manitoba as well.
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    That sounds pretty reasonable, yeah.
- MadeThisToReply 5y ago
  Not bothering with a movement license (sorry, "vaccine passport") in the first place?
- syshum 5y ago
  Umm no Vaccine Passport at all... How about that. The amount of tyranny people are willing to accept as a response to this is still baffling to me, it is like this is the first time humanity has ever encountered a communicable illness... This is not the proper way to respond to said illness and does not bode well for the future of individual liberty
vdqtp3 5y ago
You didn't even post about the most significant PII loss in USG history - OPM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  No one likes to talk about that one, probably because Russia wasn't involved, and therefore it wouldn't be fashionable to continually harp about it.
yabones 5y ago
I'm coming at this from the perspective of Ontario, Canada. eHealth, as cumbersome and obtuse as it is, is unquestionably secure. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. We have the IPC (https://www.ipc.on.ca/ https://www.ipc.on.ca/) and several other checks and balances that must be satisfied before a system can hold health data. Not to mention the federal requirements such as PHIPA. These safety requirements are completely out the door when some guy runs a vaccine app. This leak wasn't a mishandled CVE or a zero-day - it was just lazy and sloppy design. Personally, I'm neutral on the technological aspect of 'passports'. I would prefer a hard-copy if possible to keep tech out of the question entirely, but there are absolutely ways to do it well, or at least good enough. This isn't it - this was an opportunist seizing the disorganization of the Alberta government from what I gather.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Slight nitpicks, PHIPA is provincial legislation for health information privacy, and you're likely thinking of FIPPA and MFIPPA as federal. A passport is going to be a debacle, and there will be leaks like this one and likely worse. If you happened to look at the clerks screen on their tablet when you got your last shot, the vaccination rollout was done using a salesforce app, and it's very likely it didn't go through the same checks and balances (like a privacy impact assessment) as internal govt apps. IMO, it's got a huge legal problem where it doesn't collect consent in any meaningful way (an anonymous clerk ticks boxes on a screen you can't see, with no way of verifying they have obtained your consent). At least when you sign a physical consent form, you can write-in that you are getting the shot under duress from your employer, but the rollout doesn't track that, and that's by design. The same can be said for public sector employers collecting vaccine certificate information as a condition of employment (have fun with the unions on that one), as they are also subject to PHIPA, and most of them do not have the facilities for PHIPA compliance in the handling of employee health information (PHI). There are so many technical issues with passports that it's going to be a complete discredit to government, but my impression is they don't actually care. This is a putsch to elevate a class of apparatchiks who do not assert their freedoms or rights, and where they are headed, they don't need legitimacy or credibility. There is a generation of people in government and other institutions now who are basically terrible people whose plan is to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube in terms of data, "temporary measures," and passing laws that won't withstand court challenges, and they imagine themselves as being muscular about policy. I'd predict it ends very badly for them, and if not for them, then definitely for the rest of us. One wonders why they think it will work this time.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Yeah, hugely important detail - this post should change title to what the article actually has as it's title: Portpass app may have exposed hundreds of thousands of users' personal data Because it's just fueling misinformation and mistrust of what will eventually be the official apps. C'mon CBC. People stupidly using random third party apps and you're making it out like it's the official government 'should be trustworthy' one when it isn't and is just a random app data leak story.

HelixEndeavor 5y ago
Trust me, there is no additional help needed to make large swaths of the population distrustful of the government implementing a digital "papers, please" system in order to participate in human society. And honestly, I think I would trust the government-developed app far less than a private one. Have you SEEN any government website before?

sharken 5y ago

It could have been prevented, just don't require a vaccine passport. I'm hoping that more countries will follow the danish example, where the vaccine passport was dropped on September 10, 2021. This amount of control doesn't make any sense in countries with high percentage of vaccination such as Canada. Another country about to make this mistake is Scotland.

newsbinator 5y ago
There's an argument to be made, not that I'm making it, that you need to have vaccine passports in order to get from 80-something % vaccinated to some higher key immunity threshold, since otherwise it's hard to convince the final group of unvaccinated stragglers to get vaccinated.
- Romanulus 5y ago
  That's an interesting use of the word 'convince' you've made there.
- syshum 5y ago
  >>it's hard to convince the final group Hmmm that is an odd spelling for coerce, force, threaten...
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    You should look up the definition of those words, they don't apply here.
    - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
      Yeah, banning people from participating in basic society unless they take the medical procedure you want them to is totally not coercion in any way...
      - barbazoo 5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

> this was a third party app, NOT an official government one. Official government software is systematically high quality after all [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Romanulus 5y ago

Basically everything the government develops is third party.