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You can link an OpenPGP key to a German eID
- jmclnx 3y ago[flagged]
- dale_glass 3y agoYou can do it in many (all?) of the EU, I think, since the ID card can be used to produce a cryptographic signature. It's not a GPG signature, but that would be an easy ramp to GPG signatures. These days though I think GPG is of dubious utility, you could just as well use your ID to sign stuff and stop at that.
- yokaze 3y agoWell, in Spain you can use your eID directly: https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/wiki/DNIe-%28OpenDNIe%29#update-2013-08-27 https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/wiki/DNIe-%28OpenDNIe%29#up... And you can get a standard X.509v3 certificate from the FNMT (https://www.fnmt.es/en/ceres https://www.fnmt.es/en/ceres), or other agencies, which identifies you online for government purposes.
- hannob 3y agoInterestingly the whole page does not tell what one can practically do with this. Most likely: Nothing at all.
- Zemtomo 3y agoThe page describes it in the middle by describing how you can encrypt your email and use that connected mail box with it.
- hannob 3y agoYeah, I can use PGP to encrypt e-mail, with all the problems that come with it. However... I don't need a signature from governikus to do this.
- Zemtomo 3y agoIt becomes an official communication method. This should allow you to actually send legal save communication to the government.
- germanier 3y agoThere is no special legal status attached to that. Actual electronic signatures recognized by law are not based on GPG.
- Zemtomo 3y agoIsn't that a page from Germany? Using your eID? Do you know this or do you assume this?
- germanier 3y agoYes, my statements are about the legal reality I Germany. GPG signatures convey no special legal status above regular email even if the key is signed by a government-owned company that verified your eID.
- Zemtomo 3y agoI read it differently. But let's see how it is currently reading this can become the defacto standard. And technically it's a good workflow/choice
- usr1106 3y agoNeither can I find out a technical description what is actually certified and how. Email seems like a very insecure concept. How do they verify who controls a mailbox/email address? Signing message contents I understand. But email headers can be faked in various ways.
- kkfx 3y agoYou generate a key pair signed by a public administration, so you can "self-start" your chain-of-trust without key-signing parties witch is and was the biggest GPG/PGP issue so far...
- piuantiderp 3y agoLmao, key-signing parties are bad as a concept but signed by a public administration is up there. Have PGP, have a web of trust with...people you actually trust.
- kkfx 3y agoA web-of-trust with ONLY people I trust/know personally means a small island. Maybe useful in some VERY limited context, but definitively not in general. Let's state instead a fictional scenario: you got an email from John Doe, is really from him? Well, if it's signed with a GPG key signed by a government authority probably yes (at least, if it's not him he have successfully steal card&credentials to sign his key or something even more complex). Did you know the small "key-icon" GMail offer in it's WebUI for "trusted messages" from some well-known vendors? Well, with this you can replicate the same with anybody in Germany, trusted not by a private company but by a government authority. It's still marginal since most would not use such system, but potentially it's a pretty logic idea and a very good news.
- piuantiderp 3y agoI'd argue there is nothing worth encrypting that John Doe could communicate. Anything important in this world is best left only to people you trust. What is John Doe gonna do for you?
- haukem 3y agoThe service checks if the name in your PGP key matches the name in your identity card and signs your PGP key if it matches. I think it also checks if you can receive mails on the mail address in your PGP key. You can then use your PGP key to sign or encrypt emails or sign your git commits or other stuff you can do with PGP keys. Others who trust this signing service then known that this key really belongs to someone with your name.
- hannob 3y ago> Others who trust this signing service then known that this key really belongs to someone with your name. Yeah, but who are these others? I mean I know how PGP key signing is supposed to work. But that all is entirely hypothetical. It would be meaningful if e.g. there would be a requirement for gov agencies to accept communication with such keys with the same value as written communication. But "some fictional people may care about this signature" is meaningless.
- c00lio 3y agoThere are no official uses. Government agencies are required to accept de-mail, which is a proprietary email-like service. However, rollout has been nonexistent even among government agencies such that you cannot practically use it anywhere, they are a decade behind their rollout plan. The system itself is design-by-committee fugly, insecure and plain weird. You have to get an account with a commercial provider, all of which have closed down by now. PGP/GPG cannot be used with de-mail (except if you copy&paste the ascii-armored ciphertext into the software), and de-mail encryption is intentionally breakable anyways (officially "to scan for viruses"). The eID/ePA "elektronischer Personalausweis" electronic RFID passport which you need to use is another such weird proprietary waste of taxpayer money, accepted nowhere because it doesn't follow any standards and using the RFID function (e.g. as a bank for opening an account) costs tens of thousands per year just for the certificate you need. So nobody uses it and nobody enables the RFID functionality. Therefore the govt got the brilliant idea (among other, far less pleasant ideas such as requiring it for certain payouts) to offer free signatures on GPG/PGP keys using the ePA.
- usr1106 3y agoThis mostly looks like open software, which seems positive But in the end you can only get/use it using Google, Microsoft, Apple or Huawei. As a German citizen I don't agree that I have to sell my freedom to American companies or a Chinese one, which show little respect for our legislation. Neither as companies nor countries they reside in and whose legislation they have to comply with.
- zokier 3y agoYou can also use aosp, linux, freebsd etc: https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/en/open-source-software https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/en/open-source-software
- usr1106 3y agoLooks good! Maybe my concern was invalid.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago> As a German citizen I don't agree that I have to sell my freedom to American companies I mean your government already sells it to the USA government; why would you expect it to go any other way? It doesn't look like it's going to change either especially since the EU is writing laws and policies that guarantee dependence on American tech companies.
- warkdarrior 3y ago> > As a German citizen I don't agree that I have to sell my freedom to American companies > I mean your government already sells it to the USA government; why would you expect it to go any other way? Citation needed to show that German gov't sells data to US gov't. They may provide it for free, but I never heard of payments between gov'ts.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoI'd probably have been better saying gives the US the data but realistically they are "selling" it in return for benefits. They aren't just handing it over without getting anything for it.
- Dunedan 3y agoHere is the gist (directly taken from the website): > Governikus provides the online service for authenticating your OpenPGP key on behalf of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). This online service compares the name read from your ID card, your electronic residence permit or eID card for citizens of the European Union with the name specified in your OpenPGP key. If the names match, your public key is electronically signed by Governikus, confirming the match. The Governikus public key can be used to verify the Governikus electronic signature. So this is apparently useful if somebody wants to send an encrypted email to somebody else and want to ensure that only the desired person can read the email. For that the sender would have to check that the OpenPGP key got signed with the Governikus public key before encrypting and sending the message. What that doesn't seem to address are multiple people with the same name. So the sender know he's sending an email only John Doe can read, but he still don't know which John Doe it is. To me that sounds like something which makes only sense for a few limited use cases.
- kkfx 3y agoI might be wrong but IMO the point is sign a key/subkey with something all trust, instead of having key-signing parties or unsigned keys. This allow John Doe to publish a public key other already trust it's belong to him.
- haukem 3y agoThis is not indented as a bullet prove government authentication system, if you need this use the eID card directly. The goal is to have a CA for (existing) OpenPGP keys which checks if the name in it is matching the one from the identity card. When you sign a PGP key to tell that you trust it you should compare the name in the identity card or passport with the one from the key, this system does it automatically. One tricky part is that many people like me leave out some names in the PGP key. In the first implementation of the PGP signing service it only ensured that at least one first name and one last name is also in the PGP key. I do not know if this is still the case. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is supporting GPG4Win since many years, see for example here: https://www.golem.de/news/bsi-deutsche-behoerden-bekommen-gpg-zur-verschluesselung-2201-162167.html https://www.golem.de/news/bsi-deutsche-behoerden-bekommen-gp... Disclaimer: I worked for Governikus some years ago and worked on the initial version of this service.
- usr1106 3y agoWhat's the primary key to identify a German citizien? The full name is certainly not unique. Even combined with birthdate duplicates do probably exist. Some countries have something like a social security number. Of course those exist in Germany, too, but using them cross-functionally has long been deemed unconstitutional. So the tax office can use the tax number, but that cannot be shown e.g. in your passport or drivers licence. Analogously with every other identifier. I think some law and order politicians have tried to weaken this up, but I guess it's still not fully allowed. Asking out of real curiousity. I am German citizen, but have not lived there after the first government office got a PC.
- dale_glass 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card The document number in the upper right corner in the picture, I imagine.
- junga 3y agoYou must either own an ID card or a passport. This means having an ID card is optional. Does the German passport have a unique identifier as well? (never owned one) The tax number otoh is assigned at birth.
- aborsy 3y agoIs there a reputable identity provider that would verify a passport, SSN or similar, preferably in person, and link that to an OpenPGP key with metadata same as in the ID? Similar to this service, but linking not just the name, but more secure unique identity data. Linking the person’s name to the key is not very useful, since there are many people with that name. That’s basically a government issued smart card, that would allow the use of OpenPGP A-E-S keys for arbitrary data through a FOSS API. Keybase was a good idea, but it’s semi dead.
- nailer 3y ago> but more secure unique identity data What kind of data? eID pretty much replicates Keybase, except it's concerned with real world identity (matching your given and surname to your pubkey) rather than pseudonymous identity (matching your twitter handle or reddit account or whatever else to your pubkey). > that would allow the use of A-E-S keys for arbitrary data through a FOSS API. You can use your ECC (or RSA) keypairs to negotiate an AES or chacha+poly session key. Most cryptosystems do that (ECDHE, or DHE for RSA) now since: 1. session keys are faster (in terms of CPU) than just encrypting with the remote's pubkey. 2. if the session key is stolen, you just get access to that session (perfect forward secrecy). 3. group chats just store the session key encrypted chat, plus copies of the session key encrypted with everyone's pubkey, to save storage.
- aborsy 3y agoSocial Security number, passport number, birth certificate data, drivers license , tax information, etc. Some numbers need to be verified every few years.
- tomrod 3y agoAn OpenPGP key could be the most stable of all identifiers out there!
- lxgr 3y agoWhat if you lose it, or the private key leaks? A public key is a pretty bad identifier by itself. The combination of a good identifier with a public key/certificate binding to it is pretty powerful, though. The US has a good public identifier (SSNs), but they are completely unauthenticated. German arguably has the opposite: Widely available e-signature capable ID cards – but they only bind to your name (and DOB).
- thriftwy 3y agoIn Russia you can get a key-certificate pair (x509, perhaps with GOST algorithms) signed by government CA and then sign documents with it. How different this OpenPGP key stuff is, minus the "OpenPGP is so bad we decided to sunset it" vibe?
- varjag 3y agoThe jab at OpenPGP feels unnecessary when your yardstick is an FSB signature using a GOST.
- thriftwy 3y agoThe problem with OpenPGP has nothing to do with security, ciphers, etc - it's tooling.
- ilyt 3y agoIsn't it just "the problem is hard enough that tooling have to be complicated" ? I don't believe that in 20+ years "nobody found a good UI/UX designers for it"
- woodruffw 3y agoIt’s both: OpenPGP’s mandatory primitives are not great. There are extension RFCs for more modern primitives, but they aren’t mandatory.
- c00lio 3y agoThe OpenPGP stuff in Germany is not officially required to be accepted as a paper signature replacement anywhere. They are just doing this as an advertisement for the eID/ePA electronic RFID passport functionality that nobody wants.
- c0rrupted 3y agoOpenPGP is pretty good, I don't get why it gets criticism to be honest. It even has support for quantum resistant cryptography now if I recall correctly. It's also pretty easy to use. OpenKeyChain for Android works great. So does Kleopatra on Linux. Even thunderbird has support for it